Sawing and sawing wood.
“When the foe shall have taken whatever the limit of Cecrops
Holds within it, and all which divine Cithaeron shelters,
Then far-seeing Jove grants this to the prayers of Athena:
Safe shall the wooden wall continue for thee and thy children.”
This is from late October. By now all the leaves are gone.
As I headed to my car on Friday, a huge bird swooped out of a tree in my path and flew off. It was hard to see him well as he was flying directly away from me, but he was huge – wingspan seven or eight feet – and had a bright white tail. He had been sitting on a large branch in a big old black cherry tree overlooking a field. I presumed from his size that he was a turkey vulture, which are all over the place here, but the white tail was unusual and he flew faster than a turkey vulture typically would. The white tail, it turns out, is an unmistakable field mark for the bald eagle. And today – what a beautiful day, perfect, all sunshine and warmth – I saw him again, soaring way up above my cabin, his white head clearly visible.
I don’t know many writers who talk of Catskill Mountain Eagles, but of course I do know one:
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp – all others but liars!
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true – not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;- not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
From Melville, of course. Who else writes like that?
I’m lazy of course and only recently learned how to get all these posts in one place, but here is the complete set. You have to click “view remaining entries” to get them all.
The Packard Plant was the target of this past year’s Detroit Safari; now it gets some treatment in the Wall Street Journal. Apparently some enterprising hipsters pushed a dumptruck out of the 4th floor of the building. How it got to the 4th floor of the abandoned plant is another question. There’s video of the deed as well. The article notes that there are 80,000 derelict properties or buildings in Detroit.
I distrust anyone who attempts to portray themselves as a victim. Some people are victims, certainly, but a managed, well-researched self-presentation as such is almost always a sign of some kind of derangement. Especially when you’re one of the most powerful people in the most powerful country in the world, of course.
We have just got to get beyond this. As if, really, anyone cares what the New York Times has to say anymore anyway.
SALVI, the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies (Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum), has a new website up with various Latin resources, including a fair amount of information about their Rusticatio, the week-long Latin immersions we do during the summer. They’ve also got a piece I wrote with some hints for Latinists learning to treat the language as a language for the first time.
Whenever I think the world is coming to an end from stupidity, I just read old books. The one that has been inspiring me recently is (to be honest) Thoreau’s reading of old books. But Thoreau is approaching old-book status himself anyway:
“I learn from Topsell’s Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. He says, ‘His meat is apples, worms, or grapes; when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth, and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel, and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.” – from Thoreau, “Wild Apples”
Just came from town hall, where I voted. My fifteenth time voting (I did miss one year, due to not changing my polling place and being too sick to get back to Queens). It’s a bit exciting here in a town where at 3 p.m. you’re voter number 70. There will probably be less than 150 votes, and the town supervisor will be chosen by so small a group. But turnout, according to the poll workers, was not bad – not lower than last year. We don’t have many people here.
An Attempt At Self-Portraiture.
03-Nov-09When I moved up to the cabin, I brought a few boxes of unsorted papers with me, which I went through as the spirit prompted me. The completely useless papers – for with me, all things must be completely useless before I can destroy them – went into some paper bags which I keep by the wood stove, to start fires with. One night, as I lay some wood into the stove and reached for some paper, I pulled out an envelope. It was just a manila envelope, ripped open and quite useless, but I found I could not burn it. I found myself staring at the addresses written on it, my own former address and a return address: they had been written by the hand of a man now dead, a hand that was mouldering in a grave somewhere, and I found this mystery so overpowering that I could not burn the work of those hands that would work no more, but laid it next to my stove. Now every time I light a fire I see this envelope, grinning at me like a skull, and I will keep it there, until somehow, someday I will be comfortable with the idea.
The man who traced those letters in ink, Ray Feerick, was an assistant head of upper school at Saint David’s. He was always one of my favorites there. He had been one of the dedicated teachers of the school for decades, and then became head of the Upper School, but the work required dealing politically with parents, teachers, and students, and being ruthlessly organized, which was not him. He was transferred to a more administrative post, doing all the scheduling, arranging substitute teachers, and working behind the scenes, which was more to his temper. He ran the school theology department, and produced a newsletter called Sursum Corda, which was really quite good: I always found something in it worth reading. He wrote a stupefying amount of content for it, almost all of it thoughtful and some of it beautiful. I wrote a few pieces for it as well, and was always amazed to find that people read them: parents and other teachers would stop me to talk about them. Ray was a devout Catholic, and had a deep and abiding love for Pope John XXIII.
I know that not everyone is like this, that they would not throw out an envelope out of strange reverence for the mystery of death and those who have been taken by it. But there is something in death and transience that I simply cannot quite get my head around. Often my idea of God is simply the One that remembers Everything.