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Introduction

No one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his suffering, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.

from Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

Perhaps Flaubert is right. Regardless, humans have always used words to try to express their needs, conceptions, and sufferings. The spoken word, of course, is but a passing breeze. But when written, words can last for thousands of years and profoundly affect the way we live our lives and view our world.

This sampler began as a variation on the old question: If you were stranded on a desert island, which books would you bring? (As though you would have a choice.) Setting the number somewhat arbitrarily at 27, I began to ponder my choices.

Unfortunately, I am an aficionado of the short story, and some of my favorite authors, like Guy de Maupassant, didn’t collect their stories into well-known books. So I thought favorite writers might be the better category.

But some works, like those attributed to Shakespeare and Murasaki for example, have been the subject of scholarly debate about true authorship, while others, like the Bible, have multiple or unknown authors. So what about quotes, like the one above by Flaubert?

But mere quotes don’t seem to capture the flavor of the world of which and in which the writer writes.

So it was that I settled on the concept of passages, relatively short excerpts of great works that tell a story, that are to an extent self-contained, and that let the reader spend some time in bygone ages and far-away places in the company of genius.

Still, the most relevant way to label the selections seemed to be by author, giving the title and date at the end. To illustrate, let me quote another master of the short story, a passage that seems relevant here:

P. G. Wodehouse

“Bish,” he exclaimed, “you said a mouthful.”

from “Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo”

1930

Picking favorite passages is both arbitrary and difficult. Another time I might chose an entirely different list. You undoubtedly would.

I haven’t tried to be exhaustive; I have tried not to be exhausting. The books are exclusively from my own very limited and quirky collection. I noticed late in the process a distinct gender bias (with but a single, but significant, entry written by a woman), but I believe it reflects not my own prejudice so much as that of centuries past. There are, however, a few authors who were legally blind, so at least the disabled are represented. My criteria were principally beauty, importance, and, largely, the ability to entertain the reader.

I’ve included brief introductions. Feel free to skip them if you like, but there is a certain continuity from one introduction to the next. I've taken the liberty to include endnotes to gloss terms some readers may not recognize. Simply click on the number that appears after the word or phrase to skip to the note; clicking on the number at the beginning of that note will bring you back to that point in the text, with that line displayed at the top of the screen. [I have liberally stolen ideas from other editors for these notes and I apologize, but I thought the elucidation made up for the plagiarism. On the other hand, this work is not for sale, so I intend to make no profit.]

I hope you enjoy reading or rereading these as much as I did, and that it inspires you to delve deeper into these and other great works of literature.

At the beginning of World War II, T. H. White completed his great and popular version of the King Arthur story, which also inspired the musical and movie Camelot. In those dark days when no one was sure if England would survive, White found solace and inspiration in retelling the legend of England’s greatest days.

In this early passage from the book, Merlyn is consoling “Wart,” who doesn’t yet know he’s destined to become king, to unite a nation, and to institute the rule of law. And what better advice from Arthur’s tutor than simply to learn.

The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.

A century and a half ago Emerson was a conscience to our country and a mentor to Henry David Thoreau. In a series of ambitious philosophical essays, he tackled such challenging topics as love, intellect, art, character, and nature, as well as the ineffable bond of friendship, from which this is an excerpt.

There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named.

One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud… Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins… Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre [1], by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, — but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books…

I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon… The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

As if his talents as a physician, professor, and dean of the New York University and Yale schools of medicine weren’t enough, Dr. Thomas was also an accomplished philologist, philosopher, and speaker. Some of his talks were written as brief, entertaining essays, collections of which made the best-seller lists. In this one he consoles those of us whose identities seem more to be we-dentities.

There are psychiatric patients who are said to be incapacitated by having more than one self. One of these, an attractive intelligent young woman in distress, turned up on a television talk show a while back, sponsored to reveal her selves and their disputes. She possessed, she said, or was possessed by, no fewer than eight other separate women, all different, with different names, arguing and elbowing their way into control of the enterprise, causing unending confusion and embarrassment. She (they) wished to be rid of all of them (her), except of course herself (themselves).

People like this are called hysterics by the professionals, or maybe schizophrenics, and there is, I am told, nothing much that can be done. Having more than one self is supposed to be deeply pathological in itself, and there is no known way to evict trespassers.

I am not sure that the number of different selves is in itself all that pathological; I hope not. Eight strikes me personally as a reasonably small and easily manageable number. It is the simultaneity of their appearance that is the real problem, and I should think psychiatry would do better by simply persuading them to queue up and wait their turn, as happens in the normal rest if us. Couldn’t they be conditioned some way, by offering rewards or holding out gently threatening sanctions? “How do you do, I’m absolutely delighted to see you here and I have exactly fifty-five minutes, after which I very much regret to say someone else will be dropping in, but could I see you again tomorrow at this same time, do have a chocolate mint and let’s just talk, just the two of us.” That sort of thing might help at least to get them lined up in some kind of order.

Actually, it would embarrass me to be told that more than a single self is a kind of disease. I’ve had, in my time, more than I could possible count or keep track of. The great difference, which keeps me feeling normal, is that mine (ours) have turned up one after the other, on an orderly schedule. Five years ago I was another person, juvenile, doing and saying things I couldn’t possible agree with now. Ten years ago I was a stranger. Twenty–forty years ago…I’ve forgotten. The only thing close to what you might call illness, in my experience, was in the gaps in the queue when one had finished and left the place before the next one was ready to start, and there was nobody around at all. Luckily, that has happened only three or four times that I can recall, once when I’d become a very old child and my adolescent hadn’t appeared, and a couple of times later on when there seemed to be some confusion about who was next up. The rest of the time they have waited turns and emerged on cue ready to take over, sometimes breathless and needing last-minute briefing but nonetheless steady enough to go on. The surprising thing has always been how little background information they seemed to need, considering how the times changed. I cannot remember who it was five years ago. He was reading linguistics and had just discovered philology, as I recall, but he left before getting anything much done.

To be truthful there have been a few times when they were all there at once, like those girls on television, clamoring for attention, whole committees of them, a House Committee, a Budget Committee, a Grievance Committee, even a Committee on Membership, although I don’t know how any of them ever got in. No chairman, ever, certainly not me. At the most I’m a sort of administrative assistant. There’s never an agenda. At the end I bring in the refreshments.

What do we meet about? It is hard to say. The door bangs open and in they come, calling for the meeting to start, and then they all talk at once. Odd to say, it is not just a jumble of talk; they tend to space what they’re saying so that words and phrases from one will fit into short spaces left in silence by the others. At good times it has the feel of an intensely complicated conversation, but at others the sounds are more like something overheard in a crowded station. At worse times the silences get out of synchrony, interrupting each other; it is as though all the papers had suddenly blown off the table.

We never get anything settled. In recent years I’ve sensed an increase in their impatience with me, whoever they think I am, and with the fix they’re in. They don’t come right out and say so, but what they are beginning to want more than anything else is a chairman.

The worst times of all have been when I’ve wanted to be just one. Try walking out on the ocean beach at night, looking at stars, thinking, Be one, be one. Doesn’t work, ever. Just when you feel ascension, turning, wheeling, and that whirring sound like a mantel clock getting ready to strike, the other selves begin talking. Whatever you’re thinking, they say, it’s not like that at all.

The only way to quiet them down, get them to stop, is to play music. That does it. Bach stops them every time, in their tracks, almost as though that’s what they’ve been waiting for.

Legend has it that Queen Victoria so liked Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass that she wanted a copy of his next work as soon as it was published. What she received was a rather dry mathematics text from a bachelor-tutor of Christ Church College named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was also an amateur photographer of Victorian children. Three daughters of Dean Liddell, including eight-year-old Alice, were among them, and Dodgson made up these stories under his now-famous pseudonym to amuse them. Reprinted here is the wry poem Tweedledee recites.

Hofstadter was a professor of both computer science and cognitive science when it first became less than laughable to link the two, just twenty years ago. He employed all his skills as a teacher, mathematician, musician, philosopher, and writer when he produced what was once described as “a philosophy book disguised as a book of entertainment disguised as a book of instruction.” The subtitle of the book, incidentally, is “A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll.”

The text of the book alternates with dialogues between characters created by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno to demonstrate paradoxes: Achilles, the fastest man in the world, and the Tortoise, the slowest animal. Hofstadter creates a dialogue, given in full here, in which the lines, after the walk-on by the Crab, are repeated in retrograde order, the way crabs walk. The title “Crab Canon” refers to works of the same title by two of the men named in the title of the book: M. C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist of this century who specialized in strange, endless-loop optical illusions, and Johann Sebastian Bach, the Late Baroque German composer. The third of the triumvirate is Kurt Godel, a German mathematician who, in 1931, published a paper that shook the foundation of his field by stating that any sufficiently complex (and therefore useful) system of mathematics is necessarily incomplete. Hofstadter’s book is one of the most challenging and entertaining in this collection.

Achilles and the Tortoise happen upon each other in the park one day while strolling.

Tortoise: And it’s a perfect day for a walk. I think I’ll be walking home soon.

Tortoise: Incidentally, you’re looking in very fine fettle these days, I must say.

Achilles: Oh, you are such a philistine. In this area, the Dutch contributions are of markedly inferior taste, don’t you think?

Tortoise: I disagree, in this case. But speaking of taste, I finally saw that Crab Canon by your favorite artist, M. C. Escher, in a gallery the other day, and I fully appreciate the beauty and ingenuity with which he made one single theme mesh with itself going both backwards and forwards. But I am afraid I will always feel Bach is superior to Escher.

Achilles: I don’t know. But one thing for certain is that I don’t worry about arguments of taste. De gustibus non est disputandum.[2]

Tortoise: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?

Achilles: That’s my good friend. He often plays, the fool. But I myself wouldn’t touch a guitar with a ten-foot pole!

(Suddenly, the Crab, appearing from out of nowhere, wanders up excitedly, pointing to a rather prominent black eye.)

Crab: Hallo! Hulloo! What’s up? What’s new? You see this bump, this lump? Given to me by a grump. Ho! And on such a fine day. You see, I was just idly loafing about the park when up lumbers this giant fellow from Warsaw—a colossal bear of a man—playing a lute. He was three meters tall, if I’m a day. I mosey on up to the chap, reach skyward and manage to tap him on the knee, saying, “Pardon me, sir, but you are Pole-luting our park with your mazurkas.” But wow! he had no sense of humor—not a bit, not a wit—and pow!—he lets loose and belts me one, smack in the eye! Were it in my nature, I would crab up a storm, but in the time-honored tradition of my species, I backed off. After all, when we walk forwards, we move backwards. It’s in our genes, you know, turning round and round. That reminds me—I’ve always wondered, “Which came first—the Crab, or the Gene?” That is to say, “Which came last—the Gene, or the Crab?” I’m always turning things round and round, you know. It’s in our genes, after all. When we walk backwards, we move forwards. Ah me, oh my! I must lope along on my merry way—so off I go on such a fine day. Song “ho!” for the life of a Crab! TATA! Ole!

Tortoise: That’s my good friend. He often plays the fool. But I myself wouldn’t touch a ten-foot Pole with a guitar!

Achilles: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?

Tortoise: I don’t know. But one thing for certain is that I don’t worry about arguments of taste. Disputandum non est de gustibus.[3]

Achilles: I disagree, in this case. But speaking of taste, I finally heard that Crab Canon by your favorite composer, J. S. Bach, in a concert the other day, and I fully appreciate the beauty and ingenuity with which he made one single theme mesh with itself going both backwards and forwards. But I’m afraid I will always feel Escher is superior to Bach.

Tortoise: Oh, you are such a philistine. In this area, the Dutch contributions are of markedly inferior taste, don’t you think?

Achilles: Incidentally, you’re looking in very fine fettle these days, I must say.

Achilles: And it’s a perfect day for a walk. I think I’ll be walking home soon.

Crabs figure in this piece as well. In the work of this contemporary, Nobel Prize-winning author from Colombia, miracles are often mundane and represent yet another challenge to characters struggling with everyday life. The other continent of the Western Hemisphere remains distinctly foreign to us northerners, and Marquez gives the reader a unique view.

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

“He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.”

On my first day of college I blundered into a lecture hall for what I thought was a biology class. It turned out to be a course called “The Bible as Literature,” and just that one lecture made such an impression on me that I took the course two years later.

Regardless of one’s views of the religion(s) presented in the Holy Scriptures, there’s no arguing that they contain some of the world’s most profound and beautiful literature. I chose the story of Job because of the vivid imagery and because most of us can relate to the feeling of being abandoned by the Creator and toyed with by His evil progeny. Perhaps someone knows for sure who wrote this; I don’t. I’ve made a few minor adjustments to the text to make it more readable in this format, and changed the order of the chapters for the sake of continuity.

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.

Satan answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

The Lord said unto Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?”

Satan answered the Lord, and said, “Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased on the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face…”

And the Lord said unto Satan, “Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life.”

So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.

Job took him a potsherd [4] to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes.

Then said his wife unto him, “Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.”

But he said unto her, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?…

“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more… Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul…

“Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passeth away as a cloud. And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me. My bones are pierced in me in the night season; and my sinews take no rest… Thou liftest me up to the wind; thou causest me to ride upon it, and dissolvest my substance…

My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and I cried in the congregation. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voices of them that weep…

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee?…

“For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

“But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

“O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.”

This selection is arguably cliche. Many other, lesser known passages would also have served quite well.

I’ve included this largely because it has been so influential, perhaps as important as any single passage of English literature. The first line, of course, has come to represent the quintessential philosophical question. But there must be a dozen other phrases here that still enrich our language four centuries after their composition.

Hamlet’s soliloquy, of course, echoes Job’s lamentations, but with the additional, heretical view that implicit in man’s free will is the choice of ending one’s own life. There is certainly some justification for Hamlet’s despair: his uncle Claudius murdered the elder Hamlet, usurped the throne, and married the queen after such brief mourning that “the funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” And the argument could be made that Hamlet’s depression has exacerbated his very legitimate woes. Nevertheless, despite the famous half-dozen words at the start of this passage, Hamlet’s dilemma in the play is to do or not to do. In failing either to end his own life or to seek revenge, if not justice, from the usurper Claudius, he passively meets his doom and drags half the court down with him. Hence the tragedy.

A subtext of the play is madness. Even while suffering symptoms that would certainly merit Prozac in today’s world, Hamlet decides to feign madness both to throw off suspicion of his desire for revenge and to justify the eccentricities of his gifted and mercurial nature.

This also leads to tragedy. Ophelia, who loves and is loved by Hamlet, takes his distraction to heart, eventually succumbing herself to both madness and suicide. The dialogue portion of this scene captures a prototypical relationship: an innocent, well-intentioned woman suffering the groundless accusations of a man who spurns her in a misguided attempt to protect her.

Hamlet That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

Hamlet Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

Hamlet You should not have believed me, for virtue cannot so inoculate [14] our old stock but we shall relish [15] of it. I loved you not.

Hamlet Get thee to a nunnery. Why shouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?

Hamlet Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house. Farewell.

Hamlet If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny [16]. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.

Hamlet I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp; you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already–all but one–shall live. The rest shall keep as thy are. To a nunnery, go.

There can be no more prototypical relationship than that of Adam and Eve (she who originally nicknamed God’s creatures). But the account given in Genesis, serving the larger purpose of origin myth and moral instruction, is necessarily brief and somewhat bleak. The Original Couple are presented as barely more than children and when the Lord confronts them about eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they have gained no more knowledge from the forbidden fruit than to play the blame game.

But in the hands of the blind English poet John Milton, Adam and Eve are transformed from merely husband and wife to passionate lovers. In this passage
Adam relates to the angel Raphael his first impressions of Eve. He accepts her failings; but her beauty and her charm make her not just his ideal mate, they also make her reason and her will seem superior to his. Love makes fools of us all.

It’s interesting to note that the composition of this epic poem of the Fall of Man coincides with the historical decline of the literal interpretation of the Bible and a decreased emphasis in the Christian faith on the story of the Fall and the eternal punishments of hell.

We’ll bring the war between the sexes into modern times with this reworked fable from one of the original contributors to The New Yorker magazine. Thurber was a cartoonist as well as a writer, hampered to a degree by the fact that he, like Milton, was nearly blind. He once wrote of his drawings that they “seem to have reached completion by some other route than the common one of intent.” But he says of his writing: “It is impossible to read any of the stories from the last line to the first without experiencing a definite sensation of going backward.” That’s certainly more the case here than in Hofstadter’s “Crab Canon.”

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food.

So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Oscar Wilde was born to successful parents in Ireland, attended Oxford, and by his mid-thirties was well-known about London as a wit and a man-about-town. He achieved some success as a novelist and editor, but his real brilliance shone as a playwright, and at one point he had three successful plays running simultaneously, the best known furnishing this selection.

But this delightful romantic comedy of assumed identity was written by a man successfully prosecuted and jailed for homosexuality. After serving two years at hard labor in Reading Gaol he left both England and writing behind and died a few years later.

Here the worldly Lady Bracknell interviews Jack, an orphan, as a suitor to her daughter.

Lady Bracknell. You can take a seat, Mr. Worthing. [Looks in her pocket for notebook and pencil.]

Lady Bracknell [pencil and notebook in hand]. I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact. However, I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires. Do you smoke?

Lady Bracknell. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. How old are you?

Lady Bracknell. A very good age to be married at. I have always been of the opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?

Lady Bracknell. I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. What is your income?

Lady Bracknell. That is satisfactory. What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.…Now to minor matters. Are your parents living?

Lady Bracknell. To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Guy de Maupassant’s mother was a friend of Gustave Flaubert’s, and her young son became Flaubert’s protege. One of the master’s instructions was that, if describing a broken-down cab horse, do so in such a way that the reader could pick that horse out from a stable of a hundred similar horses.

De Maupassant helped to perfect and popularize the short story form, which bloomed for a century and faded about the end of Thurber’s career. No one ever surpassed de Maupassant’s story-telling skills.

Raised in rural Rouen, France, he spent most of his adult life in Paris, and lived life to the hilt, an avid rower and both a ladies’ man and a man’s man who knew first hand of the various strata of Parisian life. He worked a government job while he perfected his writing skills, then had a brief but very successful decade as the preeminent writer of his day before going mad and dying in his forties, probably from the effects of untreated syphilis.

Here he takes us en le boudoir for an even more cynical look at married life in the French aristocracy than Wilde gave of the English. The clever Comtesse Marguerite exerts just the right leverage on her philandering husband.

“…Let’s get this clear, shall we? We’re nothing to each other any more, are we? I’m your wife, it’s true, but a wife who is also a free agent. I was going to bestow my favors elsewhere, but you asked me to give you preference. Well, I’m prepared to do so…at the same price.”

“I’d better explain. Am I as attractive as your cocottes? Be honest with me.”

“I said: how much did the most delightful of your mistresses cost you in three months, in money, jewels, suppers, dinners, theatres, and so on?”

“You must know. Come now, let’s take a fairly modest figure. Five thousand francs a month: is that about right?”

“Well, my dear, give me five thousand francs straight away, and I’m yours for a month, starting tonight.”

The Comtesse left the room and went into her bedroom. The bed had been turned down. An indefinable perfume hung in the air, clinging to the curtains.

“You think so? But I haven’t changed my scent. I still use Peau d’Espagne.”

“Possibly. But now would you be good enough to go, because I want to go to bed.”

“So that’s how it is?” said the Comtesse. “All right, so much the worse for you.”

She slowly took off her wrap, revealing her bare white arms. She raised them above her head to unpin her hair, and under a frothy cloud of lace a little pink flesh appeared at the edge of the black silk corset.

“Don’t come any nearer,” said the Comtesse, “or I’ll get really angry!”

He clasped her in his arms and tried to kiss her. Leaning forward she seized a glass of scented water which was standing on her dressing-table and threw it over her shoulder into her husband’s face.

He straightened up, dripping with water, and muttered: “That was a stupid thing to do.”

“What do you mean, why? Whoever heard of a husband paying to screw his wife…”

“Perhaps I do. But I repeat that the idea of a man paying for his wife is stupid.”

“It’s not as stupid as going and paying a lot of cocottes when you have a wife of your own.”

The Comtesse sat down on a chaise lounge and slowly took off her stockings, peeling them off like a snake’s skin. Her pink legs emerged from the mauve silk sheaths, and she put her dainty feet one by one on the carpet.

The Comte came a little nearer and said in a tender voice: “What an odd idea that was, Marguerite!”

“But nothing could be more natural. We are strangers to each other, aren’t we? Well, you want me. You can’t marry me because we are already married. So why shouldn’t you buy me? After all, I might cost less than another woman.

“Think it over. Instead of going to some slut who would just squander it, your money will stay here, in your own home. Besides, for an intelligent man, could anything be more novel and amusing than paying for his own wife?

“Nobody really loves anything in the way of unlawful love unless it costs him a lot of money. By putting a price on our lawful love you’ll give it a new value, a savour of debauchery, the spice of wickedness. Isn’t that so?”

The Comte stood there looking at her, perplexed and annoyed, and suddenly tossed her his wallet.

“All right, you minx, there are five thousand. But let me tell you one thing…”

The Comtesse picked up the wallet, counted the money, and said in a slow drawl: “What?”

She burst out laughing and, going towards him, said: “Five thousand francs every month, Monsieur, or I’ll send you back to your cocottes. Moreover if…if you’re satisfied…I’ll ask for a rise.”

Like de Maupassant, Hemingway also wrote in and of Paris and was at least as captivated by sports and women. The theme of manhood runs throughout his writing.

He wrote, shortly after completing this short story, that it was one of his favorites. The lead character is a wealthy American sportsman on an African safari. Here’s Hemingway’s description:

Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome. He was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new, he was thirty-five years old, kept himself very fit, was good at court games, had a number of big-game fishing records, and had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward.

His wife Margot, disgusted but reassured about his emasculation, blatantly seduces the white hunter Wilson, who meditates about his experience with American women.

…They are…the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.

…If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman…what number of letters would their children be?

But, to Wilson’s surprise and Margot’s disappointment, Macomber has undergone a transformation, has become a man, has begun his short happy life.

A few minutes after this scene, though, Macomber faces a charging, wounded water buffalo, and neither Wilson nor Macomber can stop it. Margot picks up a spare hunting rifle and, ostensibly trying to help, blows her husband’s head off.

A couple of decades after writing this, Hemingway, unwilling to face his own dwindling manhood, shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle.

“By God, that was a chase,” he said. “I’ve never felt any such feeling. Wasn’t it marvelous, Margot?”

“You know I don’t think I’d ever be afraid of anything again,” Macomber said to Wilson. “Something happened in me after we first saw the buff and started after him. Like a dam bursting. It was pure excitement.”

“Cleans out your liver,” said Wilson. “Damn funny things happen to people.”

Macomber’s face was shining. “You know something did happen to me,” he said. “I feel absolutely different.”

His wife said nothing and eyed him strangely. She was sitting far back in the seat [of the car] and Macomber was sitting forward talking to Wilson who turned sideways talking over the back of the front seat.

“You know, I’d like to try another lion,” Macomber said. “I’m really not afraid of them now. After all, what can they do to you?”

“That’s it,” said Wilson. “Worst one can do is kill you. How does it go? Shakespeare. Damned good. See if I can remember. Oh, damned good. Used to quote it to myself at one time. Let’s see. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’[23] Damned fine, eh?”

He was very embarrassed, having brought out this thing he had lived by, but he had seen men come of age before and it always moved him. It was not a matter of their twenty-first birthday.

It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without opportunity for worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber, but regardless of how it had happened it had most certainly happened. Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now. He’d seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.

Heeding the admonition given to writers to “write about what you know,” Stegner wrote about all the many places where he had lived: Vermont, southern Alberta, Utah, and California. In this book, one of his last works, he writes of a literary agent (not much of a stretch from being a writer) who lives in Palo Alto, California, where Stegner taught writing at Stanford for many years.

Stegner deals with what Hemingway couldn’t: looking old age squarely in the face. Indeed, Lewis Thomas wrote in his last book that The Spectator Bird “should be required reading for any young doctor planning on geriatrics.” Stegner quotes the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius:

“And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again… And also what it is to die, and how if a man shall consider this by itself alone, to die, and separate from it in his mind all those things which with it usually represent themselves unto us, he can conceive it no otherwise, than as a work of nature, and he that fears any work of nature is a very child… What art thou, that better and divine part excepted, but as Epictetus said well, a wretched soul, appointed to carry a carcass up and down?”

Here, near the end of the book, the otherwise tough Joe Allston has broken down in tears after confessing to his wife Ruth that he had consummated, twenty years before, a relationship begun in his youth, and consummated it merely with a kiss.

From our front walk to where the drive turns down the hill is two hundred feet. Thirteen round trips make just about a mile. Many times, especially in winter when it is too muddy to walk across country, Ruth and I have carried the carcass up and down that thirteen-lap course before going to bed. It is rather like walking the deck of a ship, for the hilltop is level and high and exposed to the stars. It is one of those places where the condition of being human is inescapably sad. The lights along the dark hills are scattered and without confidence, conurbia down in the valley is only a glow on the sky. The hazed moonlight is deceptive, there are somber pools of shadow under the oaks. From up on that chilly platform you can look back down your life and see it like a Kafka road dwindling out across the Siberian waste. You can raise your head and look into the infinite spaces whose eternal silence terrified Pascal.

My absurd tears were dry after a lap or two, but I did not feel like going back in. I didn’t know what I would say to Ruth, or how I would act. The performance I had just put on had left me alarmed about my own unacknowledged possibilities. If the truth were told, and I suppose it had better be, I wanted to be alone for a while with that possibility I had renounced, or been made to renounce, twenty years before and carried around with me like a cyst ever since.

What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll? Was I that fellow whose mother loved him, but she died; whose son had been a tragedy to both his parents and himself; whose wife up to the age of twenty had been a nice girl and since the age of twenty a nice woman? Whose profession was something he did not choose, but fell into, and which he practiced with intelligence but without joy? Had I gone through my adult life glancing desperately sidelong in hope of diversion, rescue, transfiguration?

That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbitt, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to. One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation. One who would grasp the handle but not the blade. Milquetoast. Homo castratus.

I could imagine how [my romantic interlude] would be written up by…the Pleasure Principle seminar, or by any of those romantics, male and female, who live by the twitch, whose emotional shutter speed is set to catch the moment of orgasm, whose vision of the highest reach of human conduct is expressed by the consenting adult.

Well, the hell with it, I do not choose to be a consenting adult, not just to be in fashion. I have no impulse to join those the Buddha describes, those who strain always after fulfillment and in fulfillment strive to feel desire. It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good.

Many people would be surprised to learn that the first real novel was written by a court lady in Heian Japan nearly 1000 years ago. Her name is not known, since it was considered bad manners to record the name of a well-born lady. Murasaki means “purple” and is the name of one of the characters in the book, while Shikibu refers to an office her father held.

In some ways it would be hard to find a more foreign work, separated by a millennium and half the world. But many aspects of the book might seem more familiar to a contemporary reader than one of a century or two ago. Prince Genji learns to accept the buffets of fate through a peaceful but challenging reign, and along the way has a series of love affairs, not always sexual, with women ranging from young girls to older matrons. He is officially married of course but monogamy, especially in the royal court, is not the rule. Few of these affairs are casual, however, and many of the accompanying obligations last his entire life.

While Western Europe labored through the Middle Ages, culture thrived in ancient Japan. Murasaki’s characters, and presumably the social stratum they are based upon, not only write extemporaneous poetry as a part of everyday life, but the poems themselves refer with many puns and allusions to an already vast literary tradition, one that survives and retains its beauty today.

Here one of Genji’s close friends relates the story of an affair that ended badly.

“Let me tell you about a foolish woman I once knew,” said To no Chujo. “I was seeing her in secret, and I did not think that the affair was likely to last very long. But she was very beautiful, and as time passed I came to think that I must go on seeing her, if only infrequently. I sensed that she had come to depend on me. I expected signs of jealousy. There were none. She did not seem to feel the resentment a man expects from a woman he visits so seldom. She waited quietly, morning and night. My affection grew, and I let it be known that she did indeed have a man she could depend on. There was something very appealing about her (she was an orphan), letting me know that I was all she had.

“She seemed content. Untroubled, I stayed away for rather a long time. Then—I heard of it only later—my wife found a roundabout way to be objectionable.[24] I did not know that I had become a cause of pain. I had not forgotten, but I let a long time pass without writing. The woman was desperately lonely and worried for the child she had borne. One day she sent me a letter attached to a wild carnation.” His voice trembled.

“I went to see her again. The talk was open and easy, as always, but she seemed pensive as she looked out at the dewy garden from the neglected house. She seemed to be weeping, joining her laments to the songs of the autumn insects. It could have been a scene from an old romance. I whispered a verse:

“Her carnation had been the child. I made it clear that my own was the lady herself, the wild carnation no dust falls upon.[25]

“She spoke quietly all the same, and she did not seem really angry. She did shed a tear from time to time, but she seemed ashamed of herself, and anxious to avoid difficult moments. I went away feeling much relieved. It was clear that she did not want to show any sign of anger at my neglect. And so once more I stayed away for rather a long time.

“If she is still living, it must be in very unhappy circumstances. She need not have suffered so if she had asserted herself a little more in the days when we were together. She need not have put up with my absences, and I would have seen to her needs over the years. The child was a very pretty little girl. I was fond of her, and I have not been able to find any trace of her.”

Many of the writers in this collection have used pseudonyms, but the man revered in Japan by the single name Basho was called Kinsaku as a child, then Toshichiro and sometimes Chuemon as a young adult. He studied the classics of Japan and China but struggled to find a direction for his life. He took part in many sessions of renga, a form of linked poetry in which a master composed an initial verse of five, seven, and five syllables called a hokku, followed by short related verses composed extemporaneously by one or more other poets. Eventually the hokku stood alone and became known as a haiku. No one was more influential in the maturation of this still popular form than Basho.

In 1680 one of his admirers built a small wooden hut for him and a disciple gave him a stock of a type of banana tree called basho, which so captured Basho’s imagination that he named his hut and eventually himself for it.

He undertook a series of strenuous pilgrimages throughout his life to sites around Japan with religious and literary significance. The second excerpt almost seems a continuation of To no Chujo’s tale.

In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs onto it more or less blindly.

…As I was plodding along the River Fuji I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked to me as fragile as the flowers of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me.

How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive—by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind.

from The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton and The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a sleepy little town on the Mississippi River. After a short but memorable stint on a riverboat, he left with his brother to try his luck in the boomtown of Carson City, Nevada, with no luck in mining but a hopeful start in the newspaper business. He landed in San Francisco and achieved international fame as a writer. He became the personification of the wide-open new frontier of the American West.

But he took his pen name from the riverboat term for a depth of two fathoms, twelve feet. And he chose the Mississippi as the locale for his greatest work.

Of all the great scenes in Huckleberry Finn I chose one with virtually no action. But in this paragraph time holds its breath and Twain captures forever an idyll that had already vanished by the time he put it on paper. Huck and the runaway slave Jim are hiding out as they drift down the river.

Two or three nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cotton-woods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

Few writers made a career of so small an area, or made the area serve so broad a purpose. Faulkner created fictional, rural Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and filled it with generations of people, both black and white, with “unanaesthetizable nerve-endings.”

The defining event of both races in the South was the War Between The States. For whites it was a struggle to preserve not just a way of life, no matter how flawed in its conception, but to maintain stewardship over a subjugated people. For blacks, it became a spiritual exodus, leaving behind bondage and crossing the sacred river to the promised land.

Young Bayard Sartoris lives with his Granny and Ringo, a slave boy. The Union forces have wrongfully confiscated some of Granny’s mules and the three of them set out to complain and seek restitution from the Yankee commanders, unaware that the freed slaves have migrated to the riverside to try to reach the North.

That was how [Ringo] traveled for the next six days—lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though I had seen it that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. That’s how Ringo and I were. We were almost the same age, and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn’t count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us were to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognize it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he hoped to see symbolized it—the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, “This is what we will find.” He nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don’t know where, empty-handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.

William Sydney Porter lived a fairly normal life until his early thirties, but after a failed venture at publishing a comic weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone he took a job as a bank teller in Texas. He was dismissed when a $1000 discrepancy appeared in his accounts; embezzlement charges were filed a year later. He abandoned his young family and fled to New Orleans and then Mexico. But news of his wife’s failing health brought him back to the States, where he was arrested and convicted shortly before his wife died. He spent three years in the Ohio Federal Penitentiary in Columbus, the city where James Thurber was spending his amusing youth.

Porter spent his time wisely in prison, though, absorbing the quirky characteristics of his fellow inmates, including one named Orrin Henry, the source of Porter’s now famous pseudonym. His first published story, from which this excerpt was taken, appeared at the turn of the century.

For the next decade O. Henry enjoyed great success, and even today the award for short stories is named for him. This immense talent was short-lived however: he died suddenly at the age of 48.

The brevity inherent to the form suited him perfectly. Here’s a sample of how much he could do with a sentence, taken from “Suite Homes and Their Romance:”

Every day was just like another; as the days are in New York. On the morning Turpin would take bromo-seltzer, his pocket change from under the clock, his hat, not breakfast, and his departure for the office. At noon Mrs. Turpin would get out of bed and humor, put on a kimono, airs, and the water to boil for coffee.

His first story employed the characters of some of the vagrants he met both in and out of jail, particularly Whistling Dick, a classic hobo whose propensities lean more to whistling than to work. (I borrowed this character for my story “Your Money Or Your Life.”) Dick has overheard some of the more disreputable bums planning to rob the payroll of a sugar plantation on the banks of the Mississippi. He manages to warn the plantation owner in time, and the owner rewards him by taking him into his home for the Christmas holiday and offering him a job.

When, on Christmas morning, the first streaks of dawn broke above the marshes, Whistling Dick awoke and reached instinctively for his hat. Then he remembered that the skirts of Fortune had swept him into their folds on the night previous, and he went to the window and raised it, to let the fresh breath of the morning cool his brow and fix the yet dream-like memory of his good luck within his brain.

As he stood there, certain dread and ominous sounds pierced the fearful hollow of his ear.

The force of plantation workers, eager to complete the shortened task allotted to them, were all astir. The mighty din of the ogre Labor shook the earth, and the poor tattered and forever disguised Prince in search of his fortune held tight to the window-sill even in the enchanted castle, and trembled.

Already from the bosom of the mill came the thunder of rolling barrels of sugar, and (prison-like sounds) there was a great rattling of chains as the mules were harried with stimulant imprecations to their places by the wagon-tongues. A little vicious “dummy” engine, with a train of flat cars in tow, stewed and fumed on the plantation tap of the narrow-gauge railroad, and a toiling, hurrying, hallooing stream of workers were dimly seen in the half darkness loading the train with the weekly output of sugar. Here was a poem, an epic—nay, a tragedy—with work, the curse of the world, for its theme.

The December air was frosty, but the sweat broke out upon Whistling Dick’s face. He thrust his head out of the window and looked down. Fifteen feet below him, against the wall of the house, he could make out that a border of flowers grew, and by that token he overhung a bed of soft earth.

Softly as a burglar goes, he clambered out upon the sill, lowered himself until he hung by his hands alone, and then dropped safely. No one seemed to be about upon this side of the house. He dodged low and skimmed swiftly across the yard to the low fence. It was an easy matter to vault this, for a terror urged him such as lifts the gazelle over the thorn bush when the lion pursues. A crash through the dew-drenched weeds on the roadside, a clutching, slippery rush up the grassy side of the levee to the footpath at the summit, and—he was free!

The east was blushing and brightening. The wind, himself a vagrant rover, saluted his brother upon the cheek. Some wild geese, high above, gave cry. A rabbit skipped along the path before him, free to turn to the right or to the left as his mood should send him. The river slid past, and certainly no one could tell the ultimate abiding place of its waters.

A small, ruffled, brown-breasted bird, sitting upon a dogwood sapling, began a soft, throaty, tender little piping in praise of the dew which entices foolish worms from their holes; but suddenly he stopped, and sat with his head turned sidewise, listening.

From the path along the levee there burst forth a jubilant, stirring, buoyant, thrilling whistle, loud and keen and clear as the cleanest notes of the piccolo. The soaring sound rippled and trilled and arpeggioed as the songs of wild birds do not; but had a wild free grace that, in a way, reminded the small brown bird of something familiar, but exactly what he could not tell. There was in it the bird call, or reveille, that all birds know; but a great waste of lavish, unmeaning things that art had added and arranged, besides, and that were quite puzzling and strange; and the little brown bird sat with his head on one side until the sound died away in the distance.

The little bird did not know that the part of that strange warbling that he understood was just what kept the warbler without his breakfast; but he knew very well that the part he did not understand did not concern him, so he gave a little flutter of his wings and swooped down like a brown bullet upon a big fat worm that was wriggling along the levee path.

Kesey was one of Wallace Stegner’s writing students at Stanford. In another course, psychology, he participated in a test of a new substance called LSD-25. His experience with that and in the clinic gave him abundant material for his first novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

But for his second novel, and in his personal life, he returned to his native Oregon. The atmosphere of the Great Northwest so pervades it that moss grows on my copy. It’s a sprawling, ramshackle book about the stubbornly independent, and flawed, Stamper family. Lee Stamper listens as patriarch Henry, his arm in a cast after an accident in the woods, is persuaded by his son Hank to tell the grandkids one of his tall tales.

“We did it,” [Henry] cried, warming up to his subject. “Me and the donkey.[26] We whupped it, the swamp, the woods, all. Damn tootin’.” The words rattled like wet dice among the loose dentures. He paused to arrange his teeth and his cast more comfortably. Chalk, I thought to myself happily, as the liquor rose to my eyes and brought him into looming focus, chalk, limestone, and ivory. Teeth, limbs, and head; he’s turning directly from flesh legend to statue in one move, thereby cutting some park-commissioned sculptor out of a job…

“Let me tell you, me an’ the donk—ah…What was I saying? Oh, about them oldtime tales where we greased the skids and drove the ox and all that noise? Let me see now…” He concentrated, zeroing in on the past. “Oh, I recall oncet about forty years ago: we had this slide, ya see, like a big greasy trough running from the hill down to the river, an’ we was easin’ the logs into the slide. Zoom! Zoom! Kersplash. Float it down t’ the mill, zoom, kersplash. So oncet we’d just got this one big bastard of a fir eased into the trough and she’s just commencin’ to start inchin’ down before the big steep, an’ I look an’ here come that boogin’ mailboat! Boy, howdy! I see we got a dead-center bead on her. That log’ll break her clean in half. Oh mother, let me think: who was it run that boat? The Pierce boys, I think, or was it Eggleston an’ his kid? Ah? Anyhow this is the picture; that log, it just can not be stopped, but maybe slowed. So I quick as a flash pick up a water bucket and scoop it fulla dirt an’ gravel an’ I jump on that big devil before she gets up too momentium. And I ride her down, sprinklin’ that dirt ahead of us in the skid trough to slow her. And sure it slowed her, you bet it did; maybe one gnat hair it slowed her down. Next thing I’m blazin’ down that hill with Ben and Aaron hollerin’ somewhere behind me, hollerin’ ‘Jump, you dumb nigger, jump!’ I don’t say nothin’—I’m hangin’ on with teeth, toenails an’ all—but if I could of I’d of told them You get on this here log goin’ so fast everything’s a blur an’ let’s see you jump! Yeah. See anybody nuts enough to jump, by god.”

He paused to take the bottle from Hank. He tipped it to his indrawn lips and swallowed with an impressive gurgling; when he brought it down he held it to the lamp, making it slyly obvious that he had drunk a good two inches without wincing. “You boys like a little nip too?” offering the bottle and making his challenge implicit by the bright green glitter in his old satyr’s eye. “No? Reckon not? Well, don’t say I didn’t make the gesture.” And started to tip the bottle again.

“But–but go on, Uncle Henry!” Squeaky could endure the old man’s theatrics no longer.

“What happened?” Squeaky cried, and the twins echoed her plea. “What happened–happened?”…

“Happened?” He craned his neck about to check. “Happened where? I don’t see a thing.” Face as innocent as a billygoat’s.

“Oh yeah, that log. Lemme see, by gosh. You mean, don’t you, that log I was ridin’ lickety-brintle down the slide trough to certain disaster? Hmm, let me see.” He closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his hooked nose in deep thought; even the apathetic shadows perked up and moved in closer to hear. “Well then, right at the last I come up with me a idea; I thought I’d try throwin’ the bucket underneath the bastard. I pitched it up ahead on the trough, but the log shoved it rattlin’ an’ clatterin’ along in front for a piece like that ol’ bucket was a horsefly it was tryin’ to brush aside—hey! sonofagun, that makes me think: have you boys checked that outfit Teddy’s got goin’ at the Snag for killin’ bugs? Slickest-working’ piece of machinery I ever—”

“Hm? Ah. Yessir. Right at the last I saw there weren’t nothin’ for me to do but dive. So I give a jump. But lo an’ behol’, my gallusses is catched onto a stob! an’ me an’ that fir went shootin’ off into the wild blue yonder, aimin’ to tear hell out of the side of that mailboat—did, too, if you got to know; so me up there tryin’ to be the big hero with the bucket was all just so much yellin’ at the wind, ’cause it did! hit that boat and split it to kingdom come, letters flyin’ in all directions like somebody’s set off a blizzard: letters, nuts, bolts, steamfittin’s, kin’lin’ wood, an’ that boy steerin’ it flung straight in the air—an’ it was the Pierce boy, too, come to think of it, because I recall he ’n’ his brother allus useta trade off makin’ the runs and the one off duty got mighty sore about havin’ to pilot full-time after his brother was drownt—”

“Me? Lord love us, Squeaky, honey, I thought you knew. Why, your ol’ Uncle Henry was killed! You didn’t think a man could survive a fall like that, now did you? I was killed!”

His head fell back. His mouth gaped in death agony. The children looked on, stunned to horrified silence, until his belly began to shake with amusement. “Henry, you!” shouted the twins, and each breathed a disappointed “Ahhh.” Squeaky reacted with a hiss of outrage and fell to kicking at his cast with blue-flanneled feet. Henry laughed until tears poured down his gullied cheeks.

Bradbury is mostly known for his science fiction, which is unique in its human approach to even the most alien characters. But his talents as a writer go beyond the supernatural and extend into the extraordinary. Here is the key passage from his idyll set in the Waukegan, Illinois, of his youth.

The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered. And now that Douglas knew, he really knew he was alive, and moved turning through the world to touch and see it all, it was only right and proper that some of his new knowledge, some of this special vintage day would be sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks or months and perhaps some of the miracle by then forgotten and in need of renewal. Since this was going to be a summer of unguessed wonders, he wanted it all salvaged and labeled so that any time he wished, he might tiptoe down in this dank twilight and reach up his fingertips.

And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day—the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew in early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine.

Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. “Here we go!”

The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest.

Even Grandma, when snow was whirling fast, dizzying the world, blinding windows, stealing breath from gasping mouths, even Grandma, one day in February, would vanish to the cellar.

Above, in the vast house, there would be coughings, sneezings, wheezings, and groans, childish fevers, throats raw as butcher’s meat, noses like bottled cherries, the stealthy microbe everywhere.

Then, rising from the cellar like a June goddess, Grandma would come, something hidden but obvious under her knitted shawl. This, carried to every miserable room upstairs-and-down would be dispensed with aroma and clarity into neat glasses, to be swigged neatly.

The medicines of another time, the balm of sun and idle August afternoons, the faintly heard sounds of ice wagons passing on brick avenues, the rush of silver skyrockets and the fountaining of lawn mowers moving through ant countries, all these, all these in a glass.

Yes, even Grandma, drawn to the cellar of winter for a June adventure, might stand alone and quietly, in secret conclave with her own soul and spirit, as did Grandfather and Father and Uncle Bert, or some of the boarders, communing with a last touch of a calendar long departed, with the picnics and the warm rains and the smell of fields of wheat and new popcorn and bending hay. Even Grandma, repeating and repeating the fine and golden words, even as they were said now in this moment when the flowers were dropped into the press, as they would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time. Saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark.

I heard Heller speak at the Air Force Academy once, where a cadet asked about his war experiences in World War II. Heller replied that Catch-22 was based on his air force service in the Korean War, but he felt that it wouldn’t have the same impact if he set it in “the forgotten war.”

But his greatest novel belongs in the second half of the twentieth century, and in some ways it helped set the tone for America after “the Big One.” Certainly the title itself, never particularly well-defined in the book, has entered the common parlance, usually implying some sort of double bind situation. But the Second World War had purpose and sincerity, and the enemy was reassuringly restricted to the other side of the battlefield. The world of Yossarian, Nately, and the rest of the wacky crew is disturbingly nonsensical and the threats come from all sides.

This work affected me greatly. The iconoclasm suited my nature and the rapidly shifting scenes kept me intrigued. But mostly I loved the humor, one of the most challenging and rare achievements in literature.

This scene takes place in a bordello in Rome, where Nately and some others have sought some diversion from the rigors of war. Nately, young and idealistic, gets a little more than he bargained for. [Incidentally, a mere forty years after this was published, there has been a mysterious and disturbing decline in the populations of frogs and other amphibians around the globe.]

The amazing place was a fertile, seething cornucopia of female nipples and navels…The girls disrobed at once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality…

The old man watched…with victorious merriment, sitting in his musty blue armchair like some satanic and hedonistic deity on a throne, a stolen U. S. Army blanket wrapped around his sunken, shrewd eyes sparkling perceptively with a cynical and wanton enjoyment. He had been drinking. Nately reacted on sight with bristling enmity to this wicked, depraved and unpatriotic old man who was old enough to remind him of his father and who made disparaging jokes about America.

“America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth,” Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. “And the American fighting man is second to none.”

“Exactly,” agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. “Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that’s exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly.”

Nately guffawed with surprise, then blushed apologetically for his impoliteness. “I’m sorry I laughed at you,” he said sincerely, and he continued in a tone of respectful condescension. “'But Italy was occupied by the Germans and is now being occupied by us. You don’t call that doing very well, do you?”

“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am quite certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.”

Nately could scarcely believe his ears. He had never heard such shocking blasphemies before, and he wondered with instinctive logic why G-men did not appear to lock the traitorous old man up. “America is not going to be destroyed!” he shouted passionately.

The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. His goading remained gentle. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.”

“A million years?” persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. “A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as…the frog?”

Unlike Milton, this blind poet had to sing his epic, providing an after-dinner show that would both edify and entertain. Poetry was not a mere affectation, it was a mnemonic device to enable the singer to remember all the words and phrases, even after a goblet or two of retsina. Most translators embellish the phrasing, hoping to give it the lofty tone commensurate to the oldest, and perhaps greatest, adventure story of them all. A few years ago I bought a new prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse that strives to capture the language more accurately without florid verse. It’s quite readable.

The word “odyssey” has been extended to mean any journey, but the trip Odysseus undertook was a voyage home. Since it’s a full twenty years by the time he gets back to Ithaca, he thinks it prudent to enter his homeland disguised as a beggar, knowing that many things have changed.

Homer relies on an audience pleaser that probably was already well-worn 3000 years ago to convey the sentiment of a man’s homecoming: the dog story. As Odysseus approaches his home in the company of a swineherd, his disguise fools all but one.

As they were talking together, a hound that was lying there lifted his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus himself had bred and trained: but he had not had much good of him before he went away to the war. Formerly the young men used to take him out to hunt wild goats or hares or deer: but there he was, lying neglected, his master gone, on the midden, where the mule-dung and cow-dung was heaped in front of the gates ready to be carted out to the fields. There lay Argos the hound, covered with vermin. When he knew that it was his old master near him, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears; but he could not move to approach him. Odysseus saw, and secretly wiped a tear from his eye so that Eumaios did not notice; then he said to him:

“Eumaios, I am surprised to see this hound lying on a dung-heap. He looks a fine animal, but of course I don’t know if he has speed to match his looks, or if he is just one of those tabledogs a man keeps, something for the master to show off.”

“Eh well, to be sure his master is dead and far away. If his looks and his powers were now what they were when the master went away and left him, you’d see his strength and speed! Never a beast could escape him in the deep forest when he was on the track, for he was a prime tracker. But now he has fallen on bad times: his master has perished far from his native land, and the women care nought and do nought for him. That’s like your serfs; when the master’s hand is gone, they’ll not do an honest day’s work. Aye, Zeus Allwise takes away half the good of a man when the day of slavery catches him.”

So saying he entered the well-built mansion, and made straight for the riotous pretenders in hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had seen his master once more after twenty years.

Count Tolstoy is revered in Russia not only as a writer of the first order, but also for his interpretation of the Gospels that created during his life a new sect of Christianity. He was an effective critic of Russian society, eschewing both violence and wealth, but at the same time he understood and celebrated the inherent goodness of the Russian people.

Dostoevsky, his contemporary, wrote of Anna Karenina that it was “sheer perfection as a work of art.” Tolstoy’s other masterpiece, War and Peace, revolves around the nation during the War of 1812; this one revolves around the concept of family.

But a larger ideal takes shape in the novel, and the passage I’ve selected is pivotal to it. The Russian serfs, of which there were many, may have desired material wealth, but they were happy at the level of achievement asked of them. The aristocracy, on the other hand, a tiny minority, had the advantages of wealth but lost their bond to the land and the simple pleasures of life. Here Levin, a nobleman and a gentleman farmer, has abandoned Moscow for the harvest on the farm. While Tolstoy paints the peasantry in the brightest colors, it isn’t hard to sense the tension that would erupt in revolution and topple the aristocracy 40 years later.

…The women, carrying their rakes over their shoulders, bright in their vivid colors, walked behind the carts, their gay voices ringing merrily. One of the women started a song in a harsh, gruff voice and sang it as far as the refrain, when half a hundred powerful voices, some gruff, others shrill, took it up from the beginning again.

The singing women were approaching Levin, and he felt as if a thundercloud of merriment were bearing down upon him. The cloud bore down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he sat; and the other haycocks, the carts, and the whole of the meadow with the faraway fields all seemed to sway and vibrate to the rhythm of that wild, exhilarating, merry song with its loud shrieks, whistling, and whoops of joy. Levin was envious of this healthy merrymaking and he felt like taking part in that expression of gladness in life. But he could do nothing but lie and look and listen. When the peasants with their songs vanished out of sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of despondency at his loneliness, his physical idleness, and his hostility to this world came over Levin.

Some of those same peasants who had most disputed with him over the hay, those whom he had wronged, and those who had wanted to deceive him, those very peasants had bowed cheerfully to him, quite obviously not bearing, and indeed unable to bear, any grudge against him, or any remorse, or any recollection even of having intended to cheat him. All that had been dissolved in the sea of joyous common toil. The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.

Levin had often admired this kind of life, had often envied the people who lived this kind of life, but today, especially under the impression of what he had seen of the relations between [a peasant] and his young wife, the idea occurred to him clearly for the first time that it depended on himself alone whether or not to change his wearisome, idle, and artificial personal life for that hard-working, pure, and delightful life.

Moby Dick, a masterpiece of American literature, has become associated with difficult, turgid, assigned reading, which is a shame, since it lifts the short-lived but glorious enterprise of whaling (grisly by today’s standards but innocent enough in its time) to a metaphysical plane in masterful prose.

But during his lifetime Melville was known as “the man who lived with the cannibals,” referring to his first and most popular book, from which this selection was taken. It’s an ambiguous work, part fiction, part autobiography, and librarians still debate the proper place to file it. Based on Melville’s voyage to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific aboard the frigate Dolly in 1842, it relates his adventure with his crew-mate Toby, with whom he jumped ship. Together they manage to cross the island and are befriended by the cannibalistic natives of the Typee Valley. Here is an account of their crossing of the steep ridges in the center of the island, with no water and nothing to eat but a couple of soggy biscuits mixed with sweat and tobacco.

At last we gained the tip of the [ridge], the loftiest of those I have described as extending in parallel commanded a view of the whole intervening distance; and, discouraged as I was by other circumstances, this prospect plunged me into the very depths of despair. Nothing but dark and fearful chasms, separated by sharp-crested and perpendicular ridges as far as the eye could reach. Could we have stepped from summit to summit of these steep but narrow elevations we could easily have accomplished the distance; but we must penetrate to the bottom of every yawning gulf, and scale in succession every one of the eminences before us. Even Toby, although not suffering as I did, was not proof against the disheartening influences of the sight.

But we did not long stand to contemplate it, impatient as I was to reach the waters of the torrent which flowed beneath us. With an insensibility to danger which I cannot call to mind without shuddering, we threw ourselves down the depths of the ravine, startling its savage solitudes with the echoes produced by the falling fragments of rock we every moment dislodged from their places, careless of the insecurity of our footing, and reckless whether the slight roots and twigs we clutched at sustained us for the while or treacherously yielded to our grasp. For my own part, I scarcely knew whether I was helplessly falling from the heights above or whether the fearful rapidity with which I descended was an act of my own volition.

In a few minutes we reached the foot of the gorge, and kneeling upon a small ledge of dripping rocks, I bent over to the stream. What a delicious sensation was I now to experience! I paused for a second to concentrate all my capabilities of enjoyment, and then immerged my lips in the clear element before me. Had the apples of Sodom turned to ashes in my mouth, I could not have felt a more startling revulsion. A single drop of the cold fluid seemed to freeze every drop of blood in my body; the fever that had been burning in my veins gave place on the instant to deathlike chills, which shook me one after another like so many shocks of electricity, while the perspiration produced by my late violent exertions congealed in icy beads upon my forehead. My thirst was gone, and I fairly loathed the water. Starting to my feet, the sight of those dank rocks, oozing forth moisture at every crevice, and the dark stream shooting along its dismal channel, sent fresh chills through my shivering frame, and I felt as uncontrollable a desire to climb up towards the genial sunlight as I before had to descend the ravine.

After two hours’ perilous exertions we stood upon the summit of another ridge, and it was with difficulty I could bring myself to believe that we had ever penetrated the black and yawning chasm which then gaped at our feet. Again we gazed upon the prospect which the height commanded, but it was just as depressing as the one which had before met our eyes. I now felt that in our present situation it was in vain for us to think of ever overcoming the obstacles in our way, and I gave up all thought of reaching the vale which lay beyond this series of impediments; while at the same time I could not devise any scheme to extricate ourselves from the difficulties in which we were involved.

The remotest idea of returning to Nukuheva [27] unless assured of our vessel’s departure never once entered my mind, and indeed it was questionable whether we could have succeeded in reaching it, divided as we were from the bay by a distance we could not compute, and perplexed too in our remembrance of localities by our recent wanderings. Besides, it was unendurable the thought of retracing our steps and rendering all our painful exertions of no avail.

There is scarcely anything when a man is in difficulties that he is more disposed to look upon with abhorrence than a right-about retrograde movement—a systematic going over of the already trodden ground; and especially if he has a love of adventure, such a course appears indescribably repulsive so long as there remains the least hope to be derived from braving untried difficulties.

Joseph Heller, shortly after the Korean War, wrote a World War II novel emphasizing the absurdities of war. Pynchon, during the Viet Nam War, wrote his World War II masterpiece asserting that war itself is the enemy; forces beyond any one person’s control swallow up not only lives but souls as well.

I once characterized this National Book Award winner as a fictionalized version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. No other work has so strongly given me the impression that the author knew far more than I ever would, that it was important that I understand and that he was doing his best to make it clear, and that I was just too slow on the uptake to get everything he was saying. It angered me the first time I read it, baffled me the second, intrigued me the third, and educated me the fourth.

Pynchon is something of a mystery. In an age when blatant self-promotion is the norm, he has published a scant handful of works over four decades and little is known of his personal life.

Tyrone Slothrop, the character from whom most of the plot threads extend, is neither hero nor anti-hero, and is generally just a victim, responding to forces in place before his birth with reactions instilled, sometimes without his knowledge or against his will, ever since. Far from being the key to the plot’s resolution, he simply fades from view long before the end of the book. More central to the action is the rocket, the V-2 that the Germans developed at the end of the war, the arc of ascent and descent of which form gravity’s rainbow.

While it is certainly a daunting book, it is immensely entertaining as well. The author shifts point of view, sometimes in mid-sentence, in such a way that you begin to hear the sound of his thoughts. He employs images from cultures around the world and throughout history. His descriptions boggle. Despite the lofty purpose of the book, humor pervades it in all its forms, from the sublime to the farcical.

Here is a pivotal scene, when Slothrop has faded as a character and grown as a symbol. But to judge this book from such a small taste is like judging a banquet from a single grain of rice.

The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop’s horizons, apses out to four sides like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires…chiseled in the sandstone he finds waiting the mark of consecration, a cross in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon. Black hounds and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose breeds have been lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat as the spectators gather, it’s the fourth hanging this spring and not much spectacle here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant of who can say what lifted smock, what fat-haunched gnadige Frau [28] Death may have come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his neck breaks, he actually comes in his ragged loinwrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak of Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth at the exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it changes into a mandrake root. Next Friday, at dawn, the Magician, his own moving Heiligenschein [29] rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass, comes with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn’t been fed for a few days. The Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till it’s held only by the finest root-hairs—ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own ears with wax then comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed dog rrrowf! dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and lets loose its piercing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he’s halfway to breakfast, his holy-light freezes and fades in the million dewdrops. Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes comes to visit. “Inflation?” the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing hand-moves. “‘Capital’? Never heard of that.” “No, no," replies the visitor, “not at the moment. We’re trying to think ahead. We’d like very much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was the scream for instance?” “Had m’ears plugged up, couldn’t hear it.” The delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. “Can’t say as I blame you…”

Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in Saure [30] Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif [31] moires, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself…news flashes, names of wheelhorses that will pay him off for a certain getaway… He used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he’s lost, “Chapter 81 work,” they called it, following the scraper that clears the winter’s crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing… picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in superstition and fright he could make it all fit, seeing clearly in each entry a record, a history: his own, his winter’s, his country’s… instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer…and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…

Just north of the sleepy village of Concord, Massachusetts, is the Old North Bridge, where “once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world,” as Emerson put it at the dedication of the monument there. The grand experiment in democracy that began with that shot has been tested for eleven score years now and is the norm around the globe.

Just south of Concord is Walden Pond, a good-sized lake by western U. S. standards. There’s a parking lot and a boat house and a snack bar open in the summer, and a well-beaten track winding around the shore. A few minutes walk brings you to a different sort of monument. A small excavation, such as a man with a shovel might do in a couple of hours, is still visible in the embankment, where “long after the superstructure had disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth,” as the excavator wrote. In the center of it is a cairn, a pile of small stones and pebbles left over the years in remembrance of him. My own small stone is among the others.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe and bought a few boards from an Irishman’s shanty, and constructed a humble cabin in the woods where he lived and wrote for two years. The book he named for the pond, from which this final passage comes, remains a classic of American literature.

Perhaps his most influential work though was a short tract he wrote called Civil Disobedience. Thoreau today would be labeled a libertarian. He objected so strenuously to being taxed for a church and state he knew to be doing wrong that he spent a night in the Concord jail to prove his point. His small, personal concept of non-violent protest, however, has changed the world. Ghandi, struggling for independence in India, one of the sources of Thoreau’s transcendental philosophy, admitted that “[Civil Disobedience] left a deep impression upon me.” Even as I write this, students and workers in Serbia are marching the streets of Belgrade, protesting the government’s annulment of the recent elections. Without a shot, Thoreau’s writing continues to influence events around the world.

It influenced me as well. I first read Civil Disobedience in college and I underlined Thoreau’s objection to the government’s recent invasion in the Mexican War:

…When…a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Those sentences helped to galvanize me into joining the growing multitudes of other Americans who felt the war in Viet Nam was unjust.

Like many of the other writers in this sampler, Thoreau achieved little success or recognition in his lifetime. He died at age 44 of my namesake, TB (tuberculosis).

I left the wood for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensible we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

[1]Money

[2]“There’s no arguing with taste.”

[3]“Arguments are distasteful.”

[4]A piece of broken pottery

[5]Obstacle; literally, obstruction encountered by a bowler’s ball

[6]Scornful insult

[7]Settlement; literally, released from debt

[8]Dagger

[9]Burdens

[10]Region

[11]Literally, the high point of a hawk’s flight

[12]Prayers (because of the book of prayer she reads)

[13]Attractive

[14]Graft

[15]Have a flavor (because of original sin)

[16]Slander

[17]Vehement is derived from Latin, meaning “deprived of the mind.”

[18]Armored

[19]Highly worked

[20]Brought to perfection

[21]Perfect, with a suggestion of complete power

[22]Most discerning

[23]King Henry IV, Part 2, III, ii

[24]I.e., his wife objected to his neglecting the other woman.

[25]He refers to a poem by Oshikochi Mitsune in the great collection of Japanese poetry called the Kokinshu:

Let no dust fall upon the wild carnation,

Upon the couch where lie my love and I.

For the pink, or wild carnation, she has used the word nadeshiko, which commonly refers to a child. He has shifted to the synonymous tokonatsu, the first two syllables of which mean “bed.”

[26]The power winch for dragging cut timber to the sluice (trough) is called a donkey.

[27]The port where the Dolly still was docked; they would be severely punished for desertion if they returned.

[28]Gnadige Frau means “madam”

[29]Halo (lit., “saint shine”)

[30]Saure means “acid” in German, Saure Bummer’s nationality.

[31]A type of marijauna

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Overview Lilac Wood Your Money Or Your Life Zester The Night-light Ain't Nobody's Business The Emperor's Niece The Binder Tree Summer Of Love Passages
		Passages: A Literary Sampler
		Note: Click on a name in the list below to jump to that section. To return to the table of contents, click on the word Contents displayed in the top left corner of the screen. Contents Introduction T. H. White Ralph Waldo Emerson Lewis Thomas Lewis Carroll Douglas Hofstadter Gabriel Garcia Marquez Bible William Shakespeare John Milton James Thurber Oscar Wilde Guy de Maupassant Ernest Hemingway Wallace Stegner Murasaki Shikibu Matsuo Basho Mark Twain William Faulkner O. Henry Ken Kesey Ray Bradbury Joseph Heller Homer Leo Tolstoy Herman Melville Thomas Pynchon Henry David Thoreau Introduction No one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his suffering, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity. from Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert Perhaps Flaubert is right. Regardless, humans have always used words to try to express their needs, conceptions, and sufferings. The spoken word, of course, is but a passing breeze. But when written, words can last for thousands of years and profoundly affect the way we live our lives and view our world. This sampler began as a variation on the old question: If you were stranded on a desert island, which books would you bring? (As though you would have a choice.) Setting the number somewhat arbitrarily at 27, I began to ponder my choices. Unfortunately, I am an aficionado of the short story, and some of my favorite authors, like Guy de Maupassant, didn’t collect their stories into well-known books. So I thought favorite writers might be the better category. But some works, like those attributed to Shakespeare and Murasaki for example, have been the subject of scholarly debate about true authorship, while others, like the Bible, have multiple or unknown authors. So what about quotes, like the one above by Flaubert? But mere quotes don’t seem to capture the flavor of the world of which and in which the writer writes. So it was that I settled on the concept of passages, relatively short excerpts of great works that tell a story, that are to an extent self-contained, and that let the reader spend some time in bygone ages and far-away places in the company of genius. Still, the most relevant way to label the selections seemed to be by author, giving the title and date at the end. To illustrate, let me quote another master of the short story, a passage that seems relevant here: P. G. Wodehouse “Bish,” he exclaimed, “you said a mouthful.” from “Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo” 1930 Picking favorite passages is both arbitrary and difficult. Another time I might chose an entirely different list. You undoubtedly would. I haven’t tried to be exhaustive; I have tried not to be exhausting. The books are exclusively from my own very limited and quirky collection. I noticed late in the process a distinct gender bias (with but a single, but significant, entry written by a woman), but I believe it reflects not my own prejudice so much as that of centuries past. There are, however, a few authors who were legally blind, so at least the disabled are represented. My criteria were principally beauty, importance, and, largely, the ability to entertain the reader. I’ve included brief introductions. Feel free to skip them if you like, but there is a certain continuity from one introduction to the next. I've taken the liberty to include endnotes to gloss terms some readers may not recognize. Simply click on the number that appears after the word or phrase to skip to the note; clicking on the number at the beginning of that note will bring you back to that point in the text, with that line displayed at the top of the screen. [I have liberally stolen ideas from other editors for these notes and I apologize, but I thought the elucidation made up for the plagiarism. On the other hand, this work is not for sale, so I intend to make no profit.] I hope you enjoy reading or rereading these as much as I did, and that it inspires you to delve deeper into these and other great works of literature. One T. H. White A wizard has the first word. At the beginning of World War II, T. H. White completed his great and popular version of the King Arthur story, which also inspired the musical and movie Camelot. In those dark days when no one was sure if England would survive, White found solace and inspiration in retelling the legend of England’s greatest days. In this early passage from the book, Merlyn is consoling “Wart,” who doesn’t yet know he’s destined to become king, to unite a nation, and to institute the rule of law. And what better advice from Arthur’s tutor than simply to learn. The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough. from The Once and Future King Book I, Chapter 21 1939 Two Ralph Waldo Emerson A century and a half ago Emerson was a conscience to our country and a mentor to Henry David Thoreau. In a series of ambitious philosophical essays, he tackled such challenging topics as love, intellect, art, character, and nature, as well as the ineffable bond of friendship, from which this is an excerpt. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud… Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins… Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre [1], by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, — but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books… I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon… The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery. from Essays: First Series “Friendship” 1865 Three Lewis Thomas As if his talents as a physician, professor, and dean of the New York University and Yale schools of medicine weren’t enough, Dr. Thomas was also an accomplished philologist, philosopher, and speaker. Some of his talks were written as brief, entertaining essays, collections of which made the best-seller lists. In this one he consoles those of us whose identities seem more to be we-dentities. There are psychiatric patients who are said to be incapacitated by having more than one self. One of these, an attractive intelligent young woman in distress, turned up on a television talk show a while back, sponsored to reveal her selves and their disputes. She possessed, she said, or was possessed by, no fewer than eight other separate women, all different, with different names, arguing and elbowing their way into control of the enterprise, causing unending confusion and embarrassment. She (they) wished to be rid of all of them (her), except of course herself (themselves). People like this are called hysterics by the professionals, or maybe schizophrenics, and there is, I am told, nothing much that can be done. Having more than one self is supposed to be deeply pathological in itself, and there is no known way to evict trespassers. I am not sure that the number of different selves is in itself all that pathological; I hope not. Eight strikes me personally as a reasonably small and easily manageable number. It is the simultaneity of their appearance that is the real problem, and I should think psychiatry would do better by simply persuading them to queue up and wait their turn, as happens in the normal rest if us. Couldn’t they be conditioned some way, by offering rewards or holding out gently threatening sanctions? “How do you do, I’m absolutely delighted to see you here and I have exactly fifty-five minutes, after which I very much regret to say someone else will be dropping in, but could I see you again tomorrow at this same time, do have a chocolate mint and let’s just talk, just the two of us.” That sort of thing might help at least to get them lined up in some kind of order. Actually, it would embarrass me to be told that more than a single self is a kind of disease. I’ve had, in my time, more than I could possible count or keep track of. The great difference, which keeps me feeling normal, is that mine (ours) have turned up one after the other, on an orderly schedule. Five years ago I was another person, juvenile, doing and saying things I couldn’t possible agree with now. Ten years ago I was a stranger. Twenty–forty years ago…I’ve forgotten. The only thing close to what you might call illness, in my experience, was in the gaps in the queue when one had finished and left the place before the next one was ready to start, and there was nobody around at all. Luckily, that has happened only three or four times that I can recall, once when I’d become a very old child and my adolescent hadn’t appeared, and a couple of times later on when there seemed to be some confusion about who was next up. The rest of the time they have waited turns and emerged on cue ready to take over, sometimes breathless and needing last-minute briefing but nonetheless steady enough to go on. The surprising thing has always been how little background information they seemed to need, considering how the times changed. I cannot remember who it was five years ago. He was reading linguistics and had just discovered philology, as I recall, but he left before getting anything much done. To be truthful there have been a few times when they were all there at once, like those girls on television, clamoring for attention, whole committees of them, a House Committee, a Budget Committee, a Grievance Committee, even a Committee on Membership, although I don’t know how any of them ever got in. No chairman, ever, certainly not me. At the most I’m a sort of administrative assistant. There’s never an agenda. At the end I bring in the refreshments. What do we meet about? It is hard to say. The door bangs open and in they come, calling for the meeting to start, and then they all talk at once. Odd to say, it is not just a jumble of talk; they tend to space what they’re saying so that words and phrases from one will fit into short spaces left in silence by the others. At good times it has the feel of an intensely complicated conversation, but at others the sounds are more like something overheard in a crowded station. At worse times the silences get out of synchrony, interrupting each other; it is as though all the papers had suddenly blown off the table. We never get anything settled. In recent years I’ve sensed an increase in their impatience with me, whoever they think I am, and with the fix they’re in. They don’t come right out and say so, but what they are beginning to want more than anything else is a chairman. The worst times of all have been when I’ve wanted to be just one. Try walking out on the ocean beach at night, looking at stars, thinking, Be one, be one. Doesn’t work, ever. Just when you feel ascension, turning, wheeling, and that whirring sound like a mantel clock getting ready to strike, the other selves begin talking. Whatever you’re thinking, they say, it’s not like that at all. The only way to quiet them down, get them to stop, is to play music. That does it. Bach stops them every time, in their tracks, almost as though that’s what they’ve been waiting for. from The Medusa and the Snail “The Selves” 1979 Four Lewis Carroll Legend has it that Queen Victoria so liked Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass that she wanted a copy of his next work as soon as it was published. What she received was a rather dry mathematics text from a bachelor-tutor of Christ Church College named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was also an amateur photographer of Victorian children. Three daughters of Dean Liddell, including eight-year-old Alice, were among them, and Dodgson made up these stories under his now-famous pseudonym to amuse them. Reprinted here is the wry poem Tweedledee recites. The Walrus and the Carpenter The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright— And this was odd, because it was The middle of the night. The moon was shining sulkily, Because she thought the sun Had got no business to be there After the day was done— “It’s very rude of him,” she said, “To come and spoil the fun!” The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead— There were no birds to fly. The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand: They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: “If this were only cleared away,” They said, “it would be grand!” “If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year, Do you suppose,” the Walrus said, “That they could get it clear?” “I doubt it,” said the Carpenter, And shed a bitter tear. “O Oysters, come and walk with us!” The Walrus did beseech. “A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, Along the briny beach: We cannot do with more than four, To give a hand to each.” The eldest Oyster looked at him, But never a word he said: The eldest Oyster winked his eye, And shook his heavy head— Meaning to say he did not choose To leave the oyster-bed. But four young Oysters hurried up, All eager for the treat: Their coats were brushed, their faces washed, Their shoes were clean and neat— And this was odd, because, you know, They hadn’t any feet. Four other oysters followed them, And yet another four; And thick and fast they came at last, And more, and more, and more— All hopping through the frothy waves, And scrambling to the shore. The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low: And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row. “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things; Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.” “But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried, “Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath, And all of us are fat!” “No hurry!” said the Carpenter. They thanked him much for that. “A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said. “is what we chiefly need; Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed— Now, if you’re ready, Oysters dear, We can begin to feed.” “But not on us!” the Oysters cried, Turning a little blue. “After such kindness, that would be A dismal thing to do!” “The night is fine,” the Walrus said. “Do you admire the view? “It was so kind of you to come! And you are very nice!” The Carpenter said nothing but “Cut us another slice. I wish you were not quite so deaf— I’ve had to ask you twice!” “It seems a shame,” the Walrus said, “To play them such a trick. After we’ve brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick!” The Carpenter said nothing but “The butter’s spread too thick!” “I weep for you,” the Walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.” With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes. “Oh Oysters,” said the Carpenter, “You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?” But answer there came none— And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one. from Through The Looking Glass “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” 1871 Five Douglas R. Hofstadter Hofstadter was a professor of both computer science and cognitive science when it first became less than laughable to link the two, just twenty years ago. He employed all his skills as a teacher, mathematician, musician, philosopher, and writer when he produced what was once described as “a philosophy book disguised as a book of entertainment disguised as a book of instruction.” The subtitle of the book, incidentally, is “A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll.” The text of the book alternates with dialogues between characters created by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno to demonstrate paradoxes: Achilles, the fastest man in the world, and the Tortoise, the slowest animal. Hofstadter creates a dialogue, given in full here, in which the lines, after the walk-on by the Crab, are repeated in retrograde order, the way crabs walk. The title “Crab Canon” refers to works of the same title by two of the men named in the title of the book: M. C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist of this century who specialized in strange, endless-loop optical illusions, and Johann Sebastian Bach, the Late Baroque German composer. The third of the triumvirate is Kurt Godel, a German mathematician who, in 1931, published a paper that shook the foundation of his field by stating that any sufficiently complex (and therefore useful) system of mathematics is necessarily incomplete. Hofstadter’s book is one of the most challenging and entertaining in this collection. . Achilles and the Tortoise happen upon each other in the park one day while strolling. Tortoise: Good day, Mr. A. Achilles: Why, same to you. Tortoise: So nice to run into you. Achilles: That echoes my thoughts. Tortoise: And it’s a perfect day for a walk. I think I’ll be walking home soon. Achilles: Oh, really? I guess there’s nothing better for you than walking. Tortoise: Incidentally, you’re looking in very fine fettle these days, I must say. Achilles: Thank you very much. Tortoise: Not at all. Here, care for one of my cigars? Achilles: Oh, you are such a philistine. In this area, the Dutch contributions are of markedly inferior taste, don’t you think? Tortoise: I disagree, in this case. But speaking of taste, I finally saw that Crab Canon by your favorite artist, M. C. Escher, in a gallery the other day, and I fully appreciate the beauty and ingenuity with which he made one single theme mesh with itself going both backwards and forwards. But I am afraid I will always feel Bach is superior to Escher. Achilles: I don’t know. But one thing for certain is that I don’t worry about arguments of taste. De gustibus non est disputandum.[2] Tortoise: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all? Achilles: To be precise, one has no frets. Tortoise: Oh, well, it’s all the same to me. Achilles: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know. Tortoise: Say, don’t you play the guitar? Achilles: That’s my good friend. He often plays, the fool. But I myself wouldn’t touch a guitar with a ten-foot pole! (Suddenly, the Crab, appearing from out of nowhere, wanders up excitedly, pointing to a rather prominent black eye.) Crab: Hallo! Hulloo! What’s up? What’s new? You see this bump, this lump? Given to me by a grump. Ho! And on such a fine day. You see, I was just idly loafing about the park when up lumbers this giant fellow from Warsaw—a colossal bear of a man—playing a lute. He was three meters tall, if I’m a day. I mosey on up to the chap, reach skyward and manage to tap him on the knee, saying, “Pardon me, sir, but you are Pole-luting our park with your mazurkas.” But wow! he had no sense of humor—not a bit, not a wit—and pow!—he lets loose and belts me one, smack in the eye! Were it in my nature, I would crab up a storm, but in the time-honored tradition of my species, I backed off. After all, when we walk forwards, we move backwards. It’s in our genes, you know, turning round and round. That reminds me—I’ve always wondered, “Which came first—the Crab, or the Gene?” That is to say, “Which came last—the Gene, or the Crab?” I’m always turning things round and round, you know. It’s in our genes, after all. When we walk backwards, we move forwards. Ah me, oh my! I must lope along on my merry way—so off I go on such a fine day. Song “ho!” for the life of a Crab! TATA! Ole! (And he disappears as suddenly as he arrived.) Tortoise: That’s my good friend. He often plays the fool. But I myself wouldn’t touch a ten-foot Pole with a guitar! Achilles: Say, don’t you play the guitar? Tortoise: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know. Achilles: Oh, well it’s all the same to me. Tortoise: To be precise, one has no frets. Achilles: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all? Tortoise: I don’t know. But one thing for certain is that I don’t worry about arguments of taste. Disputandum non est de gustibus.[3] Achilles: I disagree, in this case. But speaking of taste, I finally heard that Crab Canon by your favorite composer, J. S. Bach, in a concert the other day, and I fully appreciate the beauty and ingenuity with which he made one single theme mesh with itself going both backwards and forwards. But I’m afraid I will always feel Escher is superior to Bach. Tortoise: Oh, you are such a philistine. In this area, the Dutch contributions are of markedly inferior taste, don’t you think? Achilles: Not at all. Here, care for one of my cigars? Tortoise: Thank you very much. Achilles: Incidentally, you’re looking in very fine fettle these days, I must say. Tortoise: Oh, really? I guess there’s nothing better for you than walking. Achilles: And it’s a perfect day for a walk. I think I’ll be walking home soon. Tortoise: That echoes my thoughts. Achilles: So nice to run into you. Tortoise: Why, same to you. Achilles: Good day, Mr. T. from Godel, Escher, Bach “Crab Canon” 1979 Six Gabriel Garcia Marquez Crabs figure in this piece as well. In the work of this contemporary, Nobel Prize-winning author from Colombia, miracles are often mundane and represent yet another challenge to characters struggling with everyday life. The other continent of the Western Hemisphere remains distinctly foreign to us northerners, and Marquez gives the reader a unique view. On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings. Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake. “He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.” from A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings 1972 Seven The Holy Bible On my first day of college I blundered into a lecture hall for what I thought was a biology class. It turned out to be a course called “The Bible as Literature,” and just that one lecture made such an impression on me that I took the course two years later. Regardless of one’s views of the religion(s) presented in the Holy Scriptures, there’s no arguing that they contain some of the world’s most profound and beautiful literature. I chose the story of Job because of the vivid imagery and because most of us can relate to the feeling of being abandoned by the Creator and toyed with by His evil progeny. Perhaps someone knows for sure who wrote this; I don’t. I’ve made a few minor adjustments to the text to make it more readable in this format, and changed the order of the chapters for the sake of continuity. Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan, “Whence comest thou?” Satan answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” The Lord said unto Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?” Satan answered the Lord, and said, “Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased on the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face…” And the Lord said unto Satan, “Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life.” So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. Job took him a potsherd [4] to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes. Then said his wife unto him, “Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.” But he said unto her, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?… “As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more… Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul… “Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passeth away as a cloud. And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me. My bones are pierced in me in the night season; and my sinews take no rest… Thou liftest me up to the wind; thou causest me to ride upon it, and dissolvest my substance… My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and I cried in the congregation. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voices of them that weep… “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee?… “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. “But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. “O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.” from The Book of Job King James Bible 1, 2, 30, 14 1000 B. C.(?) Eight William Shakespeare This selection is arguably cliche. Many other, lesser known passages would also have served quite well. I’ve included this largely because it has been so influential, perhaps as important as any single passage of English literature. The first line, of course, has come to represent the quintessential philosophical question. But there must be a dozen other phrases here that still enrich our language four centuries after their composition. Hamlet’s soliloquy, of course, echoes Job’s lamentations, but with the additional, heretical view that implicit in man’s free will is the choice of ending one’s own life. There is certainly some justification for Hamlet’s despair: his uncle Claudius murdered the elder Hamlet, usurped the throne, and married the queen after such brief mourning that “the funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” And the argument could be made that Hamlet’s depression has exacerbated his very legitimate woes. Nevertheless, despite the famous half-dozen words at the start of this passage, Hamlet’s dilemma in the play is to do or not to do. In failing either to end his own life or to seek revenge, if not justice, from the usurper Claudius, he passively meets his doom and drags half the court down with him. Hence the tragedy. A subtext of the play is madness. Even while suffering symptoms that would certainly merit Prozac in today’s world, Hamlet decides to feign madness both to throw off suspicion of his desire for revenge and to justify the eccentricities of his gifted and mercurial nature. This also leads to tragedy. Ophelia, who loves and is loved by Hamlet, takes his distraction to heart, eventually succumbing herself to both madness and suicide. The dialogue portion of this scene captures a prototypical relationship: an innocent, well-intentioned woman suffering the groundless accusations of a man who spurns her in a misguided attempt to protect her. Hamlet To be, or not to be—that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep– No more–and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep– To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,[5] For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,[6] The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus [7] make With a bare bodkin [8]? Who would fardels [9] bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn [10] No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch [11] and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.–Soft you now, The fair Ophelia!–Nymph, in thy orisons [12] Be all my sins remembered. Ophelia Good my lord, How does your honor for this many a day? Hamlet I humbly thank you, well, well, well. Ophelia My lord, I have remembrances of yours That I have longed long to re-deliver. I pray you, now receive them. Hamlet No, not I, I never gave you aught. Ophelia My honored lord, you know right well you did, And with them words of so sweet breath composed As made the things more rich. Their perfume lost, Take these again, for to the noble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. There, my lord. Hamlet Ha, ha! Are you honest? Ophelia My lord? Hamlet Are you fair [13]? Ophelia What means your lordship? Hamlet That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty. Ophelia Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? Hamlet Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once. Ophelia Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. Hamlet You should not have believed me, for virtue cannot so inoculate [14] our old stock but we shall relish [15] of it. I loved you not. Ophelia I was the more deceived. Hamlet Get thee to a nunnery. Why shouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father? Ophelia At home, my lord. Hamlet Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house. Farewell. Ophelia O, help him, you sweet heavens! Hamlet If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny [16]. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell. Ophelia O heavenly powers, restore him! Hamlet I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp; you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already–all but one–shall live. The rest shall keep as thy are. To a nunnery, go. from Hamlet Prince of Denmark Act III, Scene i, 56-149 1600 Nine John Milton There can be no more prototypical relationship than that of Adam and Eve (she who originally nicknamed God’s creatures). But the account given in Genesis, serving the larger purpose of origin myth and moral instruction, is necessarily brief and somewhat bleak. The Original Couple are presented as barely more than children and when the Lord confronts them about eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they have gained no more knowledge from the forbidden fruit than to play the blame game. But in the hands of the blind English poet John Milton, Adam and Eve are transformed from merely husband and wife to passionate lovers. In this passage Adam relates to the angel Raphael his first impressions of Eve. He accepts her failings; but her beauty and her charm make her not just his ideal mate, they also make her reason and her will seem superior to his. Love makes fools of us all. It’s interesting to note that the composition of this epic poem of the Fall of Man coincides with the historical decline of the literal interpretation of the Bible and a decreased emphasis in the Christian faith on the story of the Fall and the eternal punishments of hell. To the nuptial Bow’r I led her blushing like the Morn: all heav’n, And happy Constellations on that hour Shed their selectest influence; the Earth Gave sign of gratulation, and each Hill; Joyous the Birds; fresh Gales and gentle Airs Whisper’d it to the Woods, and from their wings Flung Rose, flung Odours from the spicy Shrub, Disporting, till the amorous Bird of Night Sung Spousal, and bid haste the Ev’ning Star On his Hill top, to light the bridal Lamp. Thus I have told thee all my State, and brought My Story to the sum of earthly bliss Which I enjoy, and must confess to find In all things else delight indeed, but such As us’d or not, works in the mind no change, Nor vehement [17] desire, these delicacies I mean of Taste, Sight, Smell, Herbs, Fruits, and Flow’rs, Walks, and the melody of Birds; but here Far otherwise, transported I behold, Transported touch; here passion first I felt, Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else Superior and unmov’d, here only weak Against the charm of Beauty’s powerful glance. Or Nature fail’d in mee, and left some part Not proof [18] enough such Object to sustain, Or from my side subducting, took perhaps More than enough; at least on her bestow’d Too much of Ornament, in outward show Elaborate [19], of inward less exact.[20] For well I understand in the prime end Of Nature her th’inferior, in the mind And inward Faculties, which most excel, In outward also her resembling less His Image who made both, and less expressing The character of that Dominion giv’n O’er other Creatures; yet when I approach Her loveliness, so absolute [21] she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest [22], best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discount’nanc’t, and like folly shows; Authority and Reason on her wait, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally; and to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat Build in her loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard Angelic plac’t. from Paradise Lost: Book VIII l. 521-559 1667 Ten James Thurber Ready for a break? I thought so. We’ll bring the war between the sexes into modern times with this reworked fable from one of the original contributors to The New Yorker magazine. Thurber was a cartoonist as well as a writer, hampered to a degree by the fact that he, like Milton, was nearly blind. He once wrote of his drawings that they “seem to have reached completion by some other route than the common one of intent.” But he says of his writing: “It is impossible to read any of the stories from the last line to the first without experiencing a definite sensation of going backward.” That’s certainly more the case here than in Hofstadter’s “Crab Canon.” One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. “Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood. When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead. Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be. from Fables For Our Time “The Little Girl and the Wolf” 1936 Eleven Oscar Wilde Innocence has surely passed now. (Serpents beware!) Oscar Wilde was born to successful parents in Ireland, attended Oxford, and by his mid-thirties was well-known about London as a wit and a man-about-town. He achieved some success as a novelist and editor, but his real brilliance shone as a playwright, and at one point he had three successful plays running simultaneously, the best known furnishing this selection. But this delightful romantic comedy of assumed identity was written by a man successfully prosecuted and jailed for homosexuality. After serving two years at hard labor in Reading Gaol he left both England and writing behind and died a few years later. Here the worldly Lady Bracknell interviews Jack, an orphan, as a suitor to her daughter. Lady Bracknell. You can take a seat, Mr. Worthing. [Looks in her pocket for notebook and pencil.] Jack. Thank you, Lady Bracknell, I prefer standing. Lady Bracknell [pencil and notebook in hand]. I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact. However, I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires. Do you smoke? Jack. Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. How old are you? Jack. Twenty-nine. Lady Bracknell. A very good age to be married at. I have always been of the opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know? Jack [after some hesitation]. I know nothing, Lady Bracknell. Lady Bracknell. I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. What is your income? Jack. Between seven and eight thousand a year. Lady Bracknell [makes a note in her book]. In land, or in investments? Jack. In investments, chiefly. Lady Bracknell. That is satisfactory. What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.…Now to minor matters. Are your parents living? Jack. I have lost both my parents. Lady Bracknell. To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. from The Importance of Being Earnest Act I 1895 Twelve Guy de Maupassant Guy de Maupassant’s mother was a friend of Gustave Flaubert’s, and her young son became Flaubert’s protege. One of the master’s instructions was that, if describing a broken-down cab horse, do so in such a way that the reader could pick that horse out from a stable of a hundred similar horses. De Maupassant helped to perfect and popularize the short story form, which bloomed for a century and faded about the end of Thurber’s career. No one ever surpassed de Maupassant’s story-telling skills. Raised in rural Rouen, France, he spent most of his adult life in Paris, and lived life to the hilt, an avid rower and both a ladies’ man and a man’s man who knew first hand of the various strata of Parisian life. He worked a government job while he perfected his writing skills, then had a brief but very successful decade as the preeminent writer of his day before going mad and dying in his forties, probably from the effects of untreated syphilis. Here he takes us en le boudoir for an even more cynical look at married life in the French aristocracy than Wilde gave of the English. The clever Comtesse Marguerite exerts just the right leverage on her philandering husband. “…Let’s get this clear, shall we? We’re nothing to each other any more, are we? I’m your wife, it’s true, but a wife who is also a free agent. I was going to bestow my favors elsewhere, but you asked me to give you preference. Well, I’m prepared to do so…at the same price.” “I don’t understand.” “I’d better explain. Am I as attractive as your cocottes? Be honest with me.” “A thousand times more attractive.” “More than the most attractive of them?” “A thousand times more.” “Well, how much did the most attractive of them cost you in three months?” “I don’t follow you.” “I said: how much did the most delightful of your mistresses cost you in three months, in money, jewels, suppers, dinners, theatres, and so on?” “How do I know?” “You must know. Come now, let’s take a fairly modest figure. Five thousand francs a month: is that about right?” “Yes…about that.” “Well, my dear, give me five thousand francs straight away, and I’m yours for a month, starting tonight.” “You must be mad.” “If that’s what you think—good night.” The Comtesse left the room and went into her bedroom. The bed had been turned down. An indefinable perfume hung in the air, clinging to the curtains. The Comte appeared in the doorway. “It smells delightful in here,” he said. “You think so? But I haven’t changed my scent. I still use Peau d’Espagne.” “Really? How odd… It smells very nice.” “Possibly. But now would you be good enough to go, because I want to go to bed.” “Marguerite!” “Go away!” He came right in and sat down in an armchair. “So that’s how it is?” said the Comtesse. “All right, so much the worse for you.” She slowly took off her wrap, revealing her bare white arms. She raised them above her head to unpin her hair, and under a frothy cloud of lace a little pink flesh appeared at the edge of the black silk corset. The Comte sprang to his feet and came over to her. “Don’t come any nearer,” said the Comtesse, “or I’ll get really angry!” He clasped her in his arms and tried to kiss her. Leaning forward she seized a glass of scented water which was standing on her dressing-table and threw it over her shoulder into her husband’s face. He straightened up, dripping with water, and muttered: “That was a stupid thing to do.” “Maybe…But you know my terms: five thousand francs.” “But that would be ridiculous!” “Why?” “What do you mean, why? Whoever heard of a husband paying to screw his wife…” “What crude words you use!” “Perhaps I do. But I repeat that the idea of a man paying for his wife is stupid.” “It’s not as stupid as going and paying a lot of cocottes when you have a wife of your own.” “That may be, but I don’t want to be ridiculous.” The Comtesse sat down on a chaise lounge and slowly took off her stockings, peeling them off like a snake’s skin. Her pink legs emerged from the mauve silk sheaths, and she put her dainty feet one by one on the carpet. The Comte came a little nearer and said in a tender voice: “What an odd idea that was, Marguerite!” “What idea?” “Asking me for five thousand francs.” “But nothing could be more natural. We are strangers to each other, aren’t we? Well, you want me. You can’t marry me because we are already married. So why shouldn’t you buy me? After all, I might cost less than another woman. “Think it over. Instead of going to some slut who would just squander it, your money will stay here, in your own home. Besides, for an intelligent man, could anything be more novel and amusing than paying for his own wife? “Nobody really loves anything in the way of unlawful love unless it costs him a lot of money. By putting a price on our lawful love you’ll give it a new value, a savour of debauchery, the spice of wickedness. Isn’t that so?” She stood up, almost naked, and walked towards her bathroom. “Now, Monsieur, go away, or I shall ring for my maid.” The Comte stood there looking at her, perplexed and annoyed, and suddenly tossed her his wallet. “All right, you minx, there are five thousand. But let me tell you one thing…” The Comtesse picked up the wallet, counted the money, and said in a slow drawl: “What?” “Don’t expect to make a habit of it.” She burst out laughing and, going towards him, said: “Five thousand francs every month, Monsieur, or I’ll send you back to your cocottes. Moreover if…if you’re satisfied…I’ll ask for a rise.” from “In The Bedroom” 1888 Thirteen Ernest Hemingway Like de Maupassant, Hemingway also wrote in and of Paris and was at least as captivated by sports and women. The theme of manhood runs throughout his writing. He wrote, shortly after completing this short story, that it was one of his favorites. The lead character is a wealthy American sportsman on an African safari. Here’s Hemingway’s description: Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome. He was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new, he was thirty-five years old, kept himself very fit, was good at court games, had a number of big-game fishing records, and had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward. His wife Margot, disgusted but reassured about his emasculation, blatantly seduces the white hunter Wilson, who meditates about his experience with American women. …They are…the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one. …If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman…what number of letters would their children be? But, to Wilson’s surprise and Margot’s disappointment, Macomber has undergone a transformation, has become a man, has begun his short happy life. A few minutes after this scene, though, Macomber faces a charging, wounded water buffalo, and neither Wilson nor Macomber can stop it. Margot picks up a spare hunting rifle and, ostensibly trying to help, blows her husband’s head off. A couple of decades after writing this, Hemingway, unwilling to face his own dwindling manhood, shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle. Macomber felt a wild unreasonable happiness that he had never known before. “By God, that was a chase,” he said. “I’ve never felt any such feeling. Wasn’t it marvelous, Margot?” “I hated it.” “Why?” “I hated it,” she said bitterly. “I loathed it.” “You know I don’t think I’d ever be afraid of anything again,” Macomber said to Wilson. “Something happened in me after we first saw the buff and started after him. Like a dam bursting. It was pure excitement.” “Cleans out your liver,” said Wilson. “Damn funny things happen to people.” Macomber’s face was shining. “You know something did happen to me,” he said. “I feel absolutely different.” His wife said nothing and eyed him strangely. She was sitting far back in the seat [of the car] and Macomber was sitting forward talking to Wilson who turned sideways talking over the back of the front seat. “You know, I’d like to try another lion,” Macomber said. “I’m really not afraid of them now. After all, what can they do to you?” “That’s it,” said Wilson. “Worst one can do is kill you. How does it go? Shakespeare. Damned good. See if I can remember. Oh, damned good. Used to quote it to myself at one time. Let’s see. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’[23] Damned fine, eh?” He was very embarrassed, having brought out this thing he had lived by, but he had seen men come of age before and it always moved him. It was not a matter of their twenty-first birthday. It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without opportunity for worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber, but regardless of how it had happened it had most certainly happened. Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now. He’d seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear. from The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber 1938 Fourteen Wallace Stegner Heeding the admonition given to writers to “write about what you know,” Stegner wrote about all the many places where he had lived: Vermont, southern Alberta, Utah, and California. In this book, one of his last works, he writes of a literary agent (not much of a stretch from being a writer) who lives in Palo Alto, California, where Stegner taught writing at Stanford for many years. Stegner deals with what Hemingway couldn’t: looking old age squarely in the face. Indeed, Lewis Thomas wrote in his last book that The Spectator Bird “should be required reading for any young doctor planning on geriatrics.” Stegner quotes the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again… And also what it is to die, and how if a man shall consider this by itself alone, to die, and separate from it in his mind all those things which with it usually represent themselves unto us, he can conceive it no otherwise, than as a work of nature, and he that fears any work of nature is a very child… What art thou, that better and divine part excepted, but as Epictetus said well, a wretched soul, appointed to carry a carcass up and down?” Here, near the end of the book, the otherwise tough Joe Allston has broken down in tears after confessing to his wife Ruth that he had consummated, twenty years before, a relationship begun in his youth, and consummated it merely with a kiss. From our front walk to where the drive turns down the hill is two hundred feet. Thirteen round trips make just about a mile. Many times, especially in winter when it is too muddy to walk across country, Ruth and I have carried the carcass up and down that thirteen-lap course before going to bed. It is rather like walking the deck of a ship, for the hilltop is level and high and exposed to the stars. It is one of those places where the condition of being human is inescapably sad. The lights along the dark hills are scattered and without confidence, conurbia down in the valley is only a glow on the sky. The hazed moonlight is deceptive, there are somber pools of shadow under the oaks. From up on that chilly platform you can look back down your life and see it like a Kafka road dwindling out across the Siberian waste. You can raise your head and look into the infinite spaces whose eternal silence terrified Pascal. My absurd tears were dry after a lap or two, but I did not feel like going back in. I didn’t know what I would say to Ruth, or how I would act. The performance I had just put on had left me alarmed about my own unacknowledged possibilities. If the truth were told, and I suppose it had better be, I wanted to be alone for a while with that possibility I had renounced, or been made to renounce, twenty years before and carried around with me like a cyst ever since. What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll? Was I that fellow whose mother loved him, but she died; whose son had been a tragedy to both his parents and himself; whose wife up to the age of twenty had been a nice girl and since the age of twenty a nice woman? Whose profession was something he did not choose, but fell into, and which he practiced with intelligence but without joy? Had I gone through my adult life glancing desperately sidelong in hope of diversion, rescue, transfiguration? That is the way the modern temper would read me. Babbitt, the man who in all his life never did one thing he really wanted to. One of those Blake was scornful of, who controlled their passions because their passions are feeble enough to be controlled. One of those Genteel Tradition characters whose whole pale ethos is subsumed in an act of renunciation. One who would grasp the handle but not the blade. Milquetoast. Homo castratus. I could imagine how [my romantic interlude] would be written up by…the Pleasure Principle seminar, or by any of those romantics, male and female, who live by the twitch, whose emotional shutter speed is set to catch the moment of orgasm, whose vision of the highest reach of human conduct is expressed by the consenting adult. Well, the hell with it, I do not choose to be a consenting adult, not just to be in fashion. I have no impulse to join those the Buddha describes, those who strain always after fulfillment and in fulfillment strive to feel desire. It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good. from The Spectator Bird Part 5, Chapter 4 1976 Fifteen Murasaki Shikibu Writing about relationships is obviously nothing new. Many people would be surprised to learn that the first real novel was written by a court lady in Heian Japan nearly 1000 years ago. Her name is not known, since it was considered bad manners to record the name of a well-born lady. Murasaki means “purple” and is the name of one of the characters in the book, while Shikibu refers to an office her father held. In some ways it would be hard to find a more foreign work, separated by a millennium and half the world. But many aspects of the book might seem more familiar to a contemporary reader than one of a century or two ago. Prince Genji learns to accept the buffets of fate through a peaceful but challenging reign, and along the way has a series of love affairs, not always sexual, with women ranging from young girls to older matrons. He is officially married of course but monogamy, especially in the royal court, is not the rule. Few of these affairs are casual, however, and many of the accompanying obligations last his entire life. While Western Europe labored through the Middle Ages, culture thrived in ancient Japan. Murasaki’s characters, and presumably the social stratum they are based upon, not only write extemporaneous poetry as a part of everyday life, but the poems themselves refer with many puns and allusions to an already vast literary tradition, one that survives and retains its beauty today. Here one of Genji’s close friends relates the story of an affair that ended badly. “Let me tell you about a foolish woman I once knew,” said To no Chujo. “I was seeing her in secret, and I did not think that the affair was likely to last very long. But she was very beautiful, and as time passed I came to think that I must go on seeing her, if only infrequently. I sensed that she had come to depend on me. I expected signs of jealousy. There were none. She did not seem to feel the resentment a man expects from a woman he visits so seldom. She waited quietly, morning and night. My affection grew, and I let it be known that she did indeed have a man she could depend on. There was something very appealing about her (she was an orphan), letting me know that I was all she had. “She seemed content. Untroubled, I stayed away for rather a long time. Then—I heard of it only later—my wife found a roundabout way to be objectionable.[24] I did not know that I had become a cause of pain. I had not forgotten, but I let a long time pass without writing. The woman was desperately lonely and worried for the child she had borne. One day she sent me a letter attached to a wild carnation.” His voice trembled. “And what did it say?” Genji urged him on. “Nothing very remarkable. I do remember her poem, though: “‘The fence of the mountain rustic may fall to the ground. Rest gently, O dew, upon the wild carnation.’ “I went to see her again. The talk was open and easy, as always, but she seemed pensive as she looked out at the dewy garden from the neglected house. She seemed to be weeping, joining her laments to the songs of the autumn insects. It could have been a scene from an old romance. I whispered a verse: “‘No bloom in this wild array would I wish to slight. But dearest of all to me is the wild carnation.’ “Her carnation had been the child. I made it clear that my own was the lady herself, the wild carnation no dust falls upon.[25] “She answered: “‘Dew wets the sleeve that brushes the wild carnation. The tempest rages. Now comes autumn too.’ “She spoke quietly all the same, and she did not seem really angry. She did shed a tear from time to time, but she seemed ashamed of herself, and anxious to avoid difficult moments. I went away feeling much relieved. It was clear that she did not want to show any sign of anger at my neglect. And so once more I stayed away for rather a long time. “And when I looked in on her again she had disappeared. “If she is still living, it must be in very unhappy circumstances. She need not have suffered so if she had asserted herself a little more in the days when we were together. She need not have put up with my absences, and I would have seen to her needs over the years. The child was a very pretty little girl. I was fond of her, and I have not been able to find any trace of her.” from The Tale of Genji “The Broom Tree” 1000 A.D. Sixteen Matsuo Basho Many of the writers in this collection have used pseudonyms, but the man revered in Japan by the single name Basho was called Kinsaku as a child, then Toshichiro and sometimes Chuemon as a young adult. He studied the classics of Japan and China but struggled to find a direction for his life. He took part in many sessions of renga, a form of linked poetry in which a master composed an initial verse of five, seven, and five syllables called a hokku, followed by short related verses composed extemporaneously by one or more other poets. Eventually the hokku stood alone and became known as a haiku. No one was more influential in the maturation of this still popular form than Basho. In 1680 one of his admirers built a small wooden hut for him and a disciple gave him a stock of a type of banana tree called basho, which so captured Basho’s imagination that he named his hut and eventually himself for it. He undertook a series of strenuous pilgrimages throughout his life to sites around Japan with religious and literary significance. The second excerpt almost seems a continuation of To no Chujo’s tale. In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs onto it more or less blindly. * * * …As I was plodding along the River Fuji I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked to me as fragile as the flowers of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me. The ancient poet Who pitied monkeys for their cries, What would he say, if he saw This child crying in the autumn wind? How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive—by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind. from The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton and The Narrow Road to the Deep North 1688 Seventeen Mark Twain On to a different boy, a different river. Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a sleepy little town on the Mississippi River. After a short but memorable stint on a riverboat, he left with his brother to try his luck in the boomtown of Carson City, Nevada, with no luck in mining but a hopeful start in the newspaper business. He landed in San Francisco and achieved international fame as a writer. He became the personification of the wide-open new frontier of the American West. But he took his pen name from the riverboat term for a depth of two fathoms, twelve feet. And he chose the Mississippi as the locale for his greatest work. Of all the great scenes in Huckleberry Finn I chose one with virtually no action. But in this paragraph time holds its breath and Twain captures forever an idyll that had already vanished by the time he put it on paper. Huck and the runaway slave Jim are hiding out as they drift down the river. Two or three nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cotton-woods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! from Huckleberry Finn Chapter 19 1884 Eighteen William Faulkner Few writers made a career of so small an area, or made the area serve so broad a purpose. Faulkner created fictional, rural Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and filled it with generations of people, both black and white, with “unanaesthetizable nerve-endings.” The defining event of both races in the South was the War Between The States. For whites it was a struggle to preserve not just a way of life, no matter how flawed in its conception, but to maintain stewardship over a subjugated people. For blacks, it became a spiritual exodus, leaving behind bondage and crossing the sacred river to the promised land. Young Bayard Sartoris lives with his Granny and Ringo, a slave boy. The Union forces have wrongfully confiscated some of Granny’s mules and the three of them set out to complain and seek restitution from the Yankee commanders, unaware that the freed slaves have migrated to the riverside to try to reach the North. That was how [Ringo] traveled for the next six days—lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though I had seen it that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. That’s how Ringo and I were. We were almost the same age, and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn’t count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other had not, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us were to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognize it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he hoped to see symbolized it—the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, “This is what we will find.” He nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don’t know where, empty-handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom. from The Unvanquished “Raid” 1934 Nineteen O. Henry William Sydney Porter lived a fairly normal life until his early thirties, but after a failed venture at publishing a comic weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone he took a job as a bank teller in Texas. He was dismissed when a $1000 discrepancy appeared in his accounts; embezzlement charges were filed a year later. He abandoned his young family and fled to New Orleans and then Mexico. But news of his wife’s failing health brought him back to the States, where he was arrested and convicted shortly before his wife died. He spent three years in the Ohio Federal Penitentiary in Columbus, the city where James Thurber was spending his amusing youth. Porter spent his time wisely in prison, though, absorbing the quirky characteristics of his fellow inmates, including one named Orrin Henry, the source of Porter’s now famous pseudonym. His first published story, from which this excerpt was taken, appeared at the turn of the century. For the next decade O. Henry enjoyed great success, and even today the award for short stories is named for him. This immense talent was short-lived however: he died suddenly at the age of 48. The brevity inherent to the form suited him perfectly. Here’s a sample of how much he could do with a sentence, taken from “Suite Homes and Their Romance:” Every day was just like another; as the days are in New York. On the morning Turpin would take bromo-seltzer, his pocket change from under the clock, his hat, not breakfast, and his departure for the office. At noon Mrs. Turpin would get out of bed and humor, put on a kimono, airs, and the water to boil for coffee. His first story employed the characters of some of the vagrants he met both in and out of jail, particularly Whistling Dick, a classic hobo whose propensities lean more to whistling than to work. (I borrowed this character for my story “Your Money Or Your Life.”) Dick has overheard some of the more disreputable bums planning to rob the payroll of a sugar plantation on the banks of the Mississippi. He manages to warn the plantation owner in time, and the owner rewards him by taking him into his home for the Christmas holiday and offering him a job. When, on Christmas morning, the first streaks of dawn broke above the marshes, Whistling Dick awoke and reached instinctively for his hat. Then he remembered that the skirts of Fortune had swept him into their folds on the night previous, and he went to the window and raised it, to let the fresh breath of the morning cool his brow and fix the yet dream-like memory of his good luck within his brain. As he stood there, certain dread and ominous sounds pierced the fearful hollow of his ear. The force of plantation workers, eager to complete the shortened task allotted to them, were all astir. The mighty din of the ogre Labor shook the earth, and the poor tattered and forever disguised Prince in search of his fortune held tight to the window-sill even in the enchanted castle, and trembled. Already from the bosom of the mill came the thunder of rolling barrels of sugar, and (prison-like sounds) there was a great rattling of chains as the mules were harried with stimulant imprecations to their places by the wagon-tongues. A little vicious “dummy” engine, with a train of flat cars in tow, stewed and fumed on the plantation tap of the narrow-gauge railroad, and a toiling, hurrying, hallooing stream of workers were dimly seen in the half darkness loading the train with the weekly output of sugar. Here was a poem, an epic—nay, a tragedy—with work, the curse of the world, for its theme. The December air was frosty, but the sweat broke out upon Whistling Dick’s face. He thrust his head out of the window and looked down. Fifteen feet below him, against the wall of the house, he could make out that a border of flowers grew, and by that token he overhung a bed of soft earth. Softly as a burglar goes, he clambered out upon the sill, lowered himself until he hung by his hands alone, and then dropped safely. No one seemed to be about upon this side of the house. He dodged low and skimmed swiftly across the yard to the low fence. It was an easy matter to vault this, for a terror urged him such as lifts the gazelle over the thorn bush when the lion pursues. A crash through the dew-drenched weeds on the roadside, a clutching, slippery rush up the grassy side of the levee to the footpath at the summit, and—he was free! The east was blushing and brightening. The wind, himself a vagrant rover, saluted his brother upon the cheek. Some wild geese, high above, gave cry. A rabbit skipped along the path before him, free to turn to the right or to the left as his mood should send him. The river slid past, and certainly no one could tell the ultimate abiding place of its waters. A small, ruffled, brown-breasted bird, sitting upon a dogwood sapling, began a soft, throaty, tender little piping in praise of the dew which entices foolish worms from their holes; but suddenly he stopped, and sat with his head turned sidewise, listening. From the path along the levee there burst forth a jubilant, stirring, buoyant, thrilling whistle, loud and keen and clear as the cleanest notes of the piccolo. The soaring sound rippled and trilled and arpeggioed as the songs of wild birds do not; but had a wild free grace that, in a way, reminded the small brown bird of something familiar, but exactly what he could not tell. There was in it the bird call, or reveille, that all birds know; but a great waste of lavish, unmeaning things that art had added and arranged, besides, and that were quite puzzling and strange; and the little brown bird sat with his head on one side until the sound died away in the distance. The little bird did not know that the part of that strange warbling that he understood was just what kept the warbler without his breakfast; but he knew very well that the part he did not understand did not concern him, so he gave a little flutter of his wings and swooped down like a brown bullet upon a big fat worm that was wriggling along the levee path. from Roads of Destiny “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking” 1899 Twenty Ken Kesey Kesey was one of Wallace Stegner’s writing students at Stanford. In another course, psychology, he participated in a test of a new substance called LSD-25. His experience with that and in the clinic gave him abundant material for his first novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. But for his second novel, and in his personal life, he returned to his native Oregon. The atmosphere of the Great Northwest so pervades it that moss grows on my copy. It’s a sprawling, ramshackle book about the stubbornly independent, and flawed, Stamper family. Lee Stamper listens as patriarch Henry, his arm in a cast after an accident in the woods, is persuaded by his son Hank to tell the grandkids one of his tall tales. “We did it,” [Henry] cried, warming up to his subject. “Me and the donkey.[26] We whupped it, the swamp, the woods, all. Damn tootin’.” The words rattled like wet dice among the loose dentures. He paused to arrange his teeth and his cast more comfortably. Chalk, I thought to myself happily, as the liquor rose to my eyes and brought him into looming focus, chalk, limestone, and ivory. Teeth, limbs, and head; he’s turning directly from flesh legend to statue in one move, thereby cutting some park-commissioned sculptor out of a job… “Let me tell you, me an’ the donk—ah…What was I saying? Oh, about them oldtime tales where we greased the skids and drove the ox and all that noise? Let me see now…” He concentrated, zeroing in on the past. “Oh, I recall oncet about forty years ago: we had this slide, ya see, like a big greasy trough running from the hill down to the river, an’ we was easin’ the logs into the slide. Zoom! Zoom! Kersplash. Float it down t’ the mill, zoom, kersplash. So oncet we’d just got this one big bastard of a fir eased into the trough and she’s just commencin’ to start inchin’ down before the big steep, an’ I look an’ here come that boogin’ mailboat! Boy, howdy! I see we got a dead-center bead on her. That log’ll break her clean in half. Oh mother, let me think: who was it run that boat? The Pierce boys, I think, or was it Eggleston an’ his kid? Ah? Anyhow this is the picture; that log, it just can not be stopped, but maybe slowed. So I quick as a flash pick up a water bucket and scoop it fulla dirt an’ gravel an’ I jump on that big devil before she gets up too momentium. And I ride her down, sprinklin’ that dirt ahead of us in the skid trough to slow her. And sure it slowed her, you bet it did; maybe one gnat hair it slowed her down. Next thing I’m blazin’ down that hill with Ben and Aaron hollerin’ somewhere behind me, hollerin’ ‘Jump, you dumb nigger, jump!’ I don’t say nothin’—I’m hangin’ on with teeth, toenails an’ all—but if I could of I’d of told them You get on this here log goin’ so fast everything’s a blur an’ let’s see you jump! Yeah. See anybody nuts enough to jump, by god.” He paused to take the bottle from Hank. He tipped it to his indrawn lips and swallowed with an impressive gurgling; when he brought it down he held it to the lamp, making it slyly obvious that he had drunk a good two inches without wincing. “You boys like a little nip too?” offering the bottle and making his challenge implicit by the bright green glitter in his old satyr’s eye. “No? Reckon not? Well, don’t say I didn’t make the gesture.” And started to tip the bottle again. “But–but go on, Uncle Henry!” Squeaky could endure the old man’s theatrics no longer. “Go on? I’m goin’ somewheres?” “What happened?” Squeaky cried, and the twins echoed her plea. “What happened–happened?”… “Happened?” HHhhhhafglkHe craned his neck about to check. “Happened where? I don’t see a thing.” Face as innocent as a billygoat’s. “About the log! the log!” “Oh yeah, that log. Lemme see, by gosh. You mean, don’t you, that log I was ridin’ lickety-brintle down the slide trough to certain disaster? Hmm, let me see.” He closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his hooked nose in deep thought; even the apathetic shadows perked up and moved in closer to hear. “Well then, right at the last I come up with me a idea; I thought I’d try throwin’ the bucket underneath the bastard. I pitched it up ahead on the trough, but the log shoved it rattlin’ an’ clatterin’ along in front for a piece like that ol’ bucket was a horsefly it was tryin’ to brush aside—hey! sonofagun, that makes me think: have you boys checked that outfit Teddy’s got goin’ at the Snag for killin’ bugs? Slickest-working’ piece of machinery I ever—” “The log! The log!” cried the children… “Hm? Ah. Yessir. Right at the last I saw there weren’t nothin’ for me to do but dive. So I give a jump. But lo an’ behol’, my gallusses is catched onto a stob! an’ me an’ that fir went shootin’ off into the wild blue yonder, aimin’ to tear hell out of the side of that mailboat—did, too, if you got to know; so me up there tryin’ to be the big hero with the bucket was all just so much yellin’ at the wind, ’cause it did! hit that boat and split it to kingdom come, letters flyin’ in all directions like somebody’s set off a blizzard: letters, nuts, bolts, steamfittin’s, kin’lin’ wood, an’ that boy steerin’ it flung straight in the air—an’ it was the Pierce boy, too, come to think of it, because I recall he ’n’ his brother allus useta trade off makin’ the runs and the one off duty got mighty sore about havin’ to pilot full-time after his brother was drownt—” “But what about you?” “Me? Lord love us, Squeaky, honey, I thought you knew. Why, your ol’ Uncle Henry was killed! You didn’t think a man could survive a fall like that, now did you? I was killed!” His head fell back. His mouth gaped in death agony. The children looked on, stunned to horrified silence, until his belly began to shake with amusement. “Henry, you!” shouted the twins, and each breathed a disappointed “Ahhh.” Squeaky reacted with a hiss of outrage and fell to kicking at his cast with blue-flanneled feet. Henry laughed until tears poured down his gullied cheeks. from Sometimes A Great Notion 1963 Twenty One Ray Bradbury Bradbury is mostly known for his science fiction, which is unique in its human approach to even the most alien characters. But his talents as a writer go beyond the supernatural and extend into the extraordinary. Here is the key passage from his idyll set in the Waukegan, Illinois, of his youth. Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered. And now that Douglas knew, he really knew he was alive, and moved turning through the world to touch and see it all, it was only right and proper that some of his new knowledge, some of this special vintage day would be sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks or months and perhaps some of the miracle by then forgotten and in need of renewal. Since this was going to be a summer of unguessed wonders, he wanted it all salvaged and labeled so that any time he wished, he might tiptoe down in this dank twilight and reach up his fingertips. And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day—the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue. Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in. “Ready, now, the rain barrel!” Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew in early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine. Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. “Here we go!” The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest. Even Grandma, when snow was whirling fast, dizzying the world, blinding windows, stealing breath from gasping mouths, even Grandma, one day in February, would vanish to the cellar. Above, in the vast house, there would be coughings, sneezings, wheezings, and groans, childish fevers, throats raw as butcher’s meat, noses like bottled cherries, the stealthy microbe everywhere. Then, rising from the cellar like a June goddess, Grandma would come, something hidden but obvious under her knitted shawl. This, carried to every miserable room upstairs-and-down would be dispensed with aroma and clarity into neat glasses, to be swigged neatly. The medicines of another time, the balm of sun and idle August afternoons, the faintly heard sounds of ice wagons passing on brick avenues, the rush of silver skyrockets and the fountaining of lawn mowers moving through ant countries, all these, all these in a glass. Yes, even Grandma, drawn to the cellar of winter for a June adventure, might stand alone and quietly, in secret conclave with her own soul and spirit, as did Grandfather and Father and Uncle Bert, or some of the boarders, communing with a last touch of a calendar long departed, with the picnics and the warm rains and the smell of fields of wheat and new popcorn and bending hay. Even Grandma, repeating and repeating the fine and golden words, even as they were said now in this moment when the flowers were dropped into the press, as they would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time. Saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark. Dandelion wine, dandelion wine, dandelion wine. from Dandelion Wine 1957 Twenty Two Joseph Heller I heard Heller speak at the Air Force Academy once, where a cadet asked about his war experiences in World War II. Heller replied that Catch-22 was based on his air force service in the Korean War, but he felt that it wouldn’t have the same impact if he set it in “the forgotten war.” But his greatest novel belongs in the second half of the twentieth century, and in some ways it helped set the tone for America after “the Big One.” Certainly the title itself, never particularly well-defined in the book, has entered the common parlance, usually implying some sort of double bind situation. But the Second World War had purpose and sincerity, and the enemy was reassuringly restricted to the other side of the battlefield. The world of Yossarian, Nately, and the rest of the wacky crew is disturbingly nonsensical and the threats come from all sides. This work affected me greatly. The iconoclasm suited my nature and the rapidly shifting scenes kept me intrigued. But mostly I loved the humor, one of the most challenging and rare achievements in literature. This scene takes place in a bordello in Rome, where Nately and some others have sought some diversion from the rigors of war. Nately, young and idealistic, gets a little more than he bargained for. [Incidentally, a mere forty years after this was published, there has been a mysterious and disturbing decline in the populations of frogs and other amphibians around the globe.] The amazing place was a fertile, seething cornucopia of female nipples and navels…The girls disrobed at once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality… The old man watched…with victorious merriment, sitting in his musty blue armchair like some satanic and hedonistic deity on a throne, a stolen U. S. Army blanket wrapped around his sunken, shrewd eyes sparkling perceptively with a cynical and wanton enjoyment. He had been drinking. Nately reacted on sight with bristling enmity to this wicked, depraved and unpatriotic old man who was old enough to remind him of his father and who made disparaging jokes about America. “America,” he said, “will lose the war. And Italy will win it.” “America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth,” Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. “And the American fighting man is second to none.” “Exactly,” agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. “Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that’s exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly.” Nately guffawed with surprise, then blushed apologetically for his impoliteness. “I’m sorry I laughed at you,” he said sincerely, and he continued in a tone of respectful condescension. “'But Italy was occupied by the Germans and is now being occupied by us. You don’t call that doing very well, do you?” “But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am quite certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.” Nately could scarcely believe his ears. He had never heard such shocking blasphemies before, and he wondered with instinctive logic why G-men did not appear to lock the traitorous old man up. “America is not going to be destroyed!” he shouted passionately. “Never?” prodded the old man softly. “Well…”Nately faltered. The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. His goading remained gentle. “Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.” Nately squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, forever is a long time, I guess.” “A million years?” persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. “A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as…the frog?” from Catch-22 “Nately‘s Old Man” 1955 Twenty Three Homer Unlike Milton, this blind poet had to sing his epic, providing an after-dinner show that would both edify and entertain. Poetry was not a mere affectation, it was a mnemonic device to enable the singer to remember all the words and phrases, even after a goblet or two of retsina. Most translators embellish the phrasing, hoping to give it the lofty tone commensurate to the oldest, and perhaps greatest, adventure story of them all. A few years ago I bought a new prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse that strives to capture the language more accurately without florid verse. It’s quite readable. The word “odyssey” has been extended to mean any journey, but the trip Odysseus undertook was a voyage home. Since it’s a full twenty years by the time he gets back to Ithaca, he thinks it prudent to enter his homeland disguised as a beggar, knowing that many things have changed. Homer relies on an audience pleaser that probably was already well-worn 3000 years ago to convey the sentiment of a man’s homecoming: the dog story. As Odysseus approaches his home in the company of a swineherd, his disguise fools all but one. As they were talking together, a hound that was lying there lifted his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus himself had bred and trained: but he had not had much good of him before he went away to the war. Formerly the young men used to take him out to hunt wild goats or hares or deer: but there he was, lying neglected, his master gone, on the midden, where the mule-dung and cow-dung was heaped in front of the gates ready to be carted out to the fields. There lay Argos the hound, covered with vermin. When he knew that it was his old master near him, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears; but he could not move to approach him. Odysseus saw, and secretly wiped a tear from his eye so that Eumaios did not notice; then he said to him: “Eumaios, I am surprised to see this hound lying on a dung-heap. He looks a fine animal, but of course I don’t know if he has speed to match his looks, or if he is just one of those tabledogs a man keeps, something for the master to show off.” Eumaios answered: “Eh well, to be sure his master is dead and far away. If his looks and his powers were now what they were when the master went away and left him, you’d see his strength and speed! Never a beast could escape him in the deep forest when he was on the track, for he was a prime tracker. But now he has fallen on bad times: his master has perished far from his native land, and the women care nought and do nought for him. That’s like your serfs; when the master’s hand is gone, they’ll not do an honest day’s work. Aye, Zeus Allwise takes away half the good of a man when the day of slavery catches him.” So saying he entered the well-built mansion, and made straight for the riotous pretenders in hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had seen his master once more after twenty years. from The Odyssey “How Odysseus Returned to His Own Home” 1000 B. C. Twenty Four Leo Tolstoy Count Tolstoy is revered in Russia not only as a writer of the first order, but also for his interpretation of the Gospels that created during his life a new sect of Christianity. He was an effective critic of Russian society, eschewing both violence and wealth, but at the same time he understood and celebrated the inherent goodness of the Russian people. Dostoevsky, his contemporary, wrote of Anna Karenina that it was “sheer perfection as a work of art.” Tolstoy’s other masterpiece, War and Peace, revolves around the nation during the War of 1812; this one revolves around the concept of family. But a larger ideal takes shape in the novel, and the passage I’ve selected is pivotal to it. The Russian serfs, of which there were many, may have desired material wealth, but they were happy at the level of achievement asked of them. The aristocracy, on the other hand, a tiny minority, had the advantages of wealth but lost their bond to the land and the simple pleasures of life. Here Levin, a nobleman and a gentleman farmer, has abandoned Moscow for the harvest on the farm. While Tolstoy paints the peasantry in the brightest colors, it isn’t hard to sense the tension that would erupt in revolution and topple the aristocracy 40 years later. …The women, carrying their rakes over their shoulders, bright in their vivid colors, walked behind the carts, their gay voices ringing merrily. One of the women started a song in a harsh, gruff voice and sang it as far as the refrain, when half a hundred powerful voices, some gruff, others shrill, took it up from the beginning again. The singing women were approaching Levin, and he felt as if a thundercloud of merriment were bearing down upon him. The cloud bore down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he sat; and the other haycocks, the carts, and the whole of the meadow with the faraway fields all seemed to sway and vibrate to the rhythm of that wild, exhilarating, merry song with its loud shrieks, whistling, and whoops of joy. Levin was envious of this healthy merrymaking and he felt like taking part in that expression of gladness in life. But he could do nothing but lie and look and listen. When the peasants with their songs vanished out of sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of despondency at his loneliness, his physical idleness, and his hostility to this world came over Levin. Some of those same peasants who had most disputed with him over the hay, those whom he had wronged, and those who had wanted to deceive him, those very peasants had bowed cheerfully to him, quite obviously not bearing, and indeed unable to bear, any grudge against him, or any remorse, or any recollection even of having intended to cheat him. All that had been dissolved in the sea of joyous common toil. The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions. Levin had often admired this kind of life, had often envied the people who lived this kind of life, but today, especially under the impression of what he had seen of the relations between [a peasant] and his young wife, the idea occurred to him clearly for the first time that it depended on himself alone whether or not to change his wearisome, idle, and artificial personal life for that hard-working, pure, and delightful life. from Anna Karenina III, 2 1876 Twenty Five Herman Melville Moby Dick, a masterpiece of American literature, has become associated with difficult, turgid, assigned reading, which is a shame, since it lifts the short-lived but glorious enterprise of whaling (grisly by today’s standards but innocent enough in its time) to a metaphysical plane in masterful prose. But during his lifetime Melville was known as “the man who lived with the cannibals,” referring to his first and most popular book, from which this selection was taken. It’s an ambiguous work, part fiction, part autobiography, and librarians still debate the proper place to file it. Based on Melville’s voyage to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific aboard the frigate Dolly in 1842, it relates his adventure with his crew-mate Toby, with whom he jumped ship. Together they manage to cross the island and are befriended by the cannibalistic natives of the Typee Valley. Here is an account of their crossing of the steep ridges in the center of the island, with no water and nothing to eat but a couple of soggy biscuits mixed with sweat and tobacco. At last we gained the tip of the [ridge], the loftiest of those I have described as extending in parallel commanded a view of the whole intervening distance; and, discouraged as I was by other circumstances, this prospect plunged me into the very depths of despair. Nothing but dark and fearful chasms, separated by sharp-crested and perpendicular ridges as far as the eye could reach. Could we have stepped from summit to summit of these steep but narrow elevations we could easily have accomplished the distance; but we must penetrate to the bottom of every yawning gulf, and scale in succession every one of the eminences before us. Even Toby, although not suffering as I did, was not proof against the disheartening influences of the sight. But we did not long stand to contemplate it, impatient as I was to reach the waters of the torrent which flowed beneath us. With an insensibility to danger which I cannot call to mind without shuddering, we threw ourselves down the depths of the ravine, startling its savage solitudes with the echoes produced by the falling fragments of rock we every moment dislodged from their places, careless of the insecurity of our footing, and reckless whether the slight roots and twigs we clutched at sustained us for the while or treacherously yielded to our grasp. For my own part, I scarcely knew whether I was helplessly falling from the heights above or whether the fearful rapidity with which I descended was an act of my own volition. In a few minutes we reached the foot of the gorge, and kneeling upon a small ledge of dripping rocks, I bent over to the stream. What a delicious sensation was I now to experience! I paused for a second to concentrate all my capabilities of enjoyment, and then immerged my lips in the clear element before me. Had the apples of Sodom turned to ashes in my mouth, I could not have felt a more startling revulsion. A single drop of the cold fluid seemed to freeze every drop of blood in my body; the fever that had been burning in my veins gave place on the instant to deathlike chills, which shook me one after another like so many shocks of electricity, while the perspiration produced by my late violent exertions congealed in icy beads upon my forehead. My thirst was gone, and I fairly loathed the water. Starting to my feet, the sight of those dank rocks, oozing forth moisture at every crevice, and the dark stream shooting along its dismal channel, sent fresh chills through my shivering frame, and I felt as uncontrollable a desire to climb up towards the genial sunlight as I before had to descend the ravine. After two hours’ perilous exertions we stood upon the summit of another ridge, and it was with difficulty I could bring myself to believe that we had ever penetrated the black and yawning chasm which then gaped at our feet. Again we gazed upon the prospect which the height commanded, but it was just as depressing as the one which had before met our eyes. I now felt that in our present situation it was in vain for us to think of ever overcoming the obstacles in our way, and I gave up all thought of reaching the vale which lay beyond this series of impediments; while at the same time I could not devise any scheme to extricate ourselves from the difficulties in which we were involved. The remotest idea of returning to Nukuheva [27] unless assured of our vessel’s departure never once entered my mind, and indeed it was questionable whether we could have succeeded in reaching it, divided as we were from the bay by a distance we could not compute, and perplexed too in our remembrance of localities by our recent wanderings. Besides, it was unendurable the thought of retracing our steps and rendering all our painful exertions of no avail. There is scarcely anything when a man is in difficulties that he is more disposed to look upon with abhorrence than a right-about retrograde movement—a systematic going over of the already trodden ground; and especially if he has a love of adventure, such a course appears indescribably repulsive so long as there remains the least hope to be derived from braving untried difficulties. from Typee Chapter VIII: “Disheartening Situation” 1847 Twenty Six Thomas Pynchon Joseph Heller, shortly after the Korean War, wrote a World War II novel emphasizing the absurdities of war. Pynchon, during the Viet Nam War, wrote his World War II masterpiece asserting that war itself is the enemy; forces beyond any one person’s control swallow up not only lives but souls as well. I once characterized this National Book Award winner as a fictionalized version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. No other work has so strongly given me the impression that the author knew far more than I ever would, that it was important that I understand and that he was doing his best to make it clear, and that I was just too slow on the uptake to get everything he was saying. It angered me the first time I read it, baffled me the second, intrigued me the third, and educated me the fourth. Pynchon is something of a mystery. In an age when blatant self-promotion is the norm, he has published a scant handful of works over four decades and little is known of his personal life. Tyrone Slothrop, the character from whom most of the plot threads extend, is neither hero nor anti-hero, and is generally just a victim, responding to forces in place before his birth with reactions instilled, sometimes without his knowledge or against his will, ever since. Far from being the key to the plot’s resolution, he simply fades from view long before the end of the book. More central to the action is the rocket, the V-2 that the Germans developed at the end of the war, the arc of ascent and descent of which form gravity’s rainbow. While it is certainly a daunting book, it is immensely entertaining as well. The author shifts point of view, sometimes in mid-sentence, in such a way that you begin to hear the sound of his thoughts. He employs images from cultures around the world and throughout history. His descriptions boggle. Despite the lofty purpose of the book, humor pervades it in all its forms, from the sublime to the farcical. Here is a pivotal scene, when Slothrop has faded as a character and grown as a symbol. But to judge this book from such a small taste is like judging a banquet from a single grain of rice. The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop’s horizons, apses out to four sides like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires…chiseled in the sandstone he finds waiting the mark of consecration, a cross in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon. Black hounds and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose breeds have been lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat as the spectators gather, it’s the fourth hanging this spring and not much spectacle here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant of who can say what lifted smock, what fat-haunched gnadige Frau [28] Death may have come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his neck breaks, he actually comes in his ragged loinwrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak of Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth at the exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it changes into a mandrake root. Next Friday, at dawn, the Magician, his own moving Heiligenschein [29] rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass, comes with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn’t been fed for a few days. The Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till it’s held only by the finest root-hairs—ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own ears with wax then comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed dog rrrowf! dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and lets loose its piercing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he’s halfway to breakfast, his holy-light freezes and fades in the million dewdrops. Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes comes to visit. “Inflation?” the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing hand-moves. “‘Capital’? Never heard of that.” “No, no," replies the visitor, “not at the moment. We’re trying to think ahead. We’d like very much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was the scream for instance?” “Had m’ears plugged up, couldn’t hear it.” The delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. “Can’t say as I blame you…” Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in Saure [30] Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif [31] moires, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself…news flashes, names of wheelhorses that will pay him off for a certain getaway… He used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he’s lost, “Chapter 81 work,” they called it, following the scraper that clears the winter’s crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing… picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in superstition and fright he could make it all fit, seeing clearly in each entry a record, a history: his own, his winter’s, his country’s… instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer…and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural… from Gravity’s Rainbow “The Counterforce” 1973 Twenty Seven Henry David Thoreau Just north of the sleepy village of Concord, Massachusetts, is the Old North Bridge, where “once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world,” as Emerson put it at the dedication of the monument there. The grand experiment in democracy that began with that shot has been tested for eleven score years now and is the norm around the globe. Just south of Concord is Walden Pond, a good-sized lake by western U. S. standards. There’s a parking lot and a boat house and a snack bar open in the summer, and a well-beaten track winding around the shore. A few minutes walk brings you to a different sort of monument. A small excavation, such as a man with a shovel might do in a couple of hours, is still visible in the embankment, where “long after the superstructure had disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth,” as the excavator wrote. In the center of it is a cairn, a pile of small stones and pebbles left over the years in remembrance of him. My own small stone is among the others. On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe and bought a few boards from an Irishman’s shanty, and constructed a humble cabin in the woods where he lived and wrote for two years. The book he named for the pond, from which this final passage comes, remains a classic of American literature. Perhaps his most influential work though was a short tract he wrote called Civil Disobedience. Thoreau today would be labeled a libertarian. He objected so strenuously to being taxed for a church and state he knew to be doing wrong that he spent a night in the Concord jail to prove his point. His small, personal concept of non-violent protest, however, has changed the world. Ghandi, struggling for independence in India, one of the sources of Thoreau’s transcendental philosophy, admitted that “[Civil Disobedience] left a deep impression upon me.” Even as I write this, students and workers in Serbia are marching the streets of Belgrade, protesting the government’s annulment of the recent elections. Without a shot, Thoreau’s writing continues to influence events around the world. It influenced me as well. I first read Civil Disobedience in college and I underlined Thoreau’s objection to the government’s recent invasion in the Mexican War: …When…a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. Those sentences helped to galvanize me into joining the growing multitudes of other Americans who felt the war in Viet Nam was unjust. Like many of the other writers in this sampler, Thoreau achieved little success or recognition in his lifetime. He died at age 44 of my namesake, TB (tuberculosis). I left the wood for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensible we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now. I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. from Walden “Conclusion” 1854 [1]Money [2]“There’s no arguing with taste.” [3]“Arguments are distasteful.” [4]A piece of broken pottery [5]Obstacle; literally, obstruction encountered by a bowler’s ball [6]Scornful insult [7]Settlement; literally, released from debt [8]Dagger [9]Burdens [10]Region [11]Literally, the high point of a hawk’s flight [12]Prayers (because of the book of prayer she reads) [13]Attractive [14]Graft [15]Have a flavor (because of original sin) [16]Slander [17]Vehement is derived from Latin, meaning “deprived of the mind.” [18]Armored [19]Highly worked [20]Brought to perfection [21]Perfect, with a suggestion of complete power [22]Most discerning [23]King Henry IV, Part 2, III, ii [24]I.e., his wife objected to his neglecting the other woman. [25]He refers to a poem by Oshikochi Mitsune in the great collection of Japanese poetry called the Kokinshu: Let no dust fall upon the wild carnation, Upon the couch where lie my love and I. For the pink, or wild carnation, she has used the word nadeshiko, which commonly refers to a child. He has shifted to the synonymous tokonatsu, the first two syllables of which mean “bed.” [26]The power winch for dragging cut timber to the sluice (trough) is called a donkey. [27]The port where the Dolly still was docked; they would be severely punished for desertion if they returned. [28]Gnadige Frau means “madam” [29]Halo (lit., “saint shine”) [30]Saure means “acid” in German, Saure Bummer’s nationality. [31]A type of marijauna