This is not the first snow of the season, but it feels like it’s the first permanent snow – the season is now setting in. Liquid water is getting harder to come by. I went down to the spring this morning, and it was still open, but not for long. I used snow to wash my dishes after lunch today. And I’m gathering buckets of the stuff to melt down for flush water. Winter has arrived.
Snow.
27-Nov-12How to Get Me to Keep Reading a Book.
27-Nov-12Put this on the second page:
When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie on the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect inside my heart and can sense the presence of the Almighty, who in a state of continuous bliss bears and sustains us – then, my friend, when it grows light before my eyes and the world around me and the sky above come to rest wholly within my soul like a beloved, I am filled often with yearning and think, if only I could express it all on paper, everything that is housed so richly and warmly within me, so that it might be the mirror of my soul as my soul is the mirror of Infinite God… ah, my dear friend… but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence.
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther. It sounds like something I could have written here at the cabin.
Woodchopping.
16-Nov-12
Cutting through wood with an axe. The wood is so pretty when freshly cut that I feel bad about using it for mere firewood. But ’tis the season for cutting wood and burning it, and nature is such that its beauties are gratuitous all.
Those of us with conservative Catholic friends had to deal with the usual Facebook nonsense about how it all was coming to an end on Election Night – I couldn’t stop snipping at one of them, “Yes, a terrible night for legitimate rapists everywhere,” which indeed would make it a bad night for a certain sort of clericalist Catholic. Now I read this priceless bit from Sullivan:
But every now and again, that parallel church actually encounters – and cannot elide – the hierarchy. In Minnesota, where a third of the population is Catholic, the hierarchy insisted that the state amend its constitution to keep gay couples out of civil society and civil marriage. The hierarchy failed – as miserably as they failed in their trumped up “war on religion” nonsense. The Amendment didn’t pass. You cannot be exposed as an institution that is responsible for covering up the rape and torture of thousands of children and have any moral authority when it comes to the constitutional equality of gay citizens or the contraceptives that 99 percent of Catholic American women use at some point.
And so in Minnesota, a 17-year-old Catholic, Lennon Cihack, who goes to mass weekly, and who was diligently preparing for his confirmation, posted on his Facebook page a picture of himself and a poster opposing the Amendment. His mother is then called into the rectory by the local priest and told that the confirmation cannot occur. Then she is told that the entire family is now barred from communion. She appeals to the bishop. He tells her that if Lennon stands in front of the whole congregation and denounces marriage equality, he can be confirmed. The priest in question has denied barring Lennon from confirmation, but does not dispute any of the facts of the case. Meanwhile, of course, Lennon’s Facebook page is brimming with likes from his class-mates who are still being confirmed.
This is where we are. It feels like the last days of the Soviet Union. And I believe the mother, not the priest. Given what we now know about the hierarchy’s corruption, isn’t that the default position?
I will confess that I have some regrets about getting an annulment from the church. While I was divorced, I was officially an outsider. And being an outsider is the privileged Christian position, and the hierarchy is not making any progress to change that. In fact, it just gets worse. While families are told they can’t receive communion because they don’t favor a particular amendment to a state constitution, the bishop of Kansas City, convicted of not reporting suspicions of child abuse, continues “fulfilling all of his responsibilities as bishop of Kansas City,” and has not been reprimanded and is expected to attend the upcoming meeting of Catholic bishops.
I use the term “pseudo-Catholic” because Catholic is supposed to mean universal, but the hierarchy more and more has nothing to say to the actual experience of the mass of Catholics. Usquequo, Domine?
Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that little life was left him,
Antony, leaving the city [Alexandria] and the conversation of his friends, built himself a dwelling-place in the water, near Pharos, upon a little mole which he cast up in the sea, and there, secluding himself from the company of mankind, said he desired nothing more than to live the life of Timon: as indeed, his case was the same, and the ingratitude and injuries which he suffered from those he had esteemed his friends made him hate and distrust all mankind.
Now Plutarch, God bless him and gifted writers everywhere, takes this opportunity to leave the life of Marc Antony, and digresses for four hundred words on this same Timon. Luckily he did not presume that his audience would know all about Timon, or could look him up on Vicipaedia: he wrote a summa of the man himself, which ended up being much more interesting than his Wikipedia page anyway. This timely digression is now virtually all we know of him. Since I imagine you will be as interested as I was what Antony might have meant by “desiring to live the life of Timon,” I will provide the digression:
This Timon was a citizen of Athens, and lived much about the Peloponnesian War, as may be seen by the comedies of Aristophanes and Plato [now lost], in which he is ridiculed as hater and enemy of mankind. He avoided and repelled the approaches of every one, but embraced with kisses and the greatest show of affection Alcibiades, then in his hot youth. And when Apemantus was astonished, and demanded the reason, he replied that he knew this young man would one day do infinite mischief to the Athenians [later Alcibiades, about to face charges of sacrilege for destroying Athenian sacred objects during a drunken orgy, fled and gave assistance to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War]. He never admitted any one into his company, except at times this Apemantus, who was of the same sort of temper, and was an imitator of his way of life. At the celebration of the festival of flagons, these two kept the feast together, and Apemantus, saying to him, “What a pleasant party, Timon!” “It would be,” he answered, “if you were not here.” One day he got up in a full assembly in the speaker’s place, and when there was a dead silence and a great wonder at so unusual a sight, he said, “Ye men of Athens, I have a little plot of ground, and in it grows a fig-tree, on which many citizens have been pleased to hang themselves; and now, having resolved to build in that place, I wish to announce it publicly, that any of you who may be desirous may go and hang yourselves before I cut it down.” He died and was buried at Halae, near the sea, where it so happened that, after his burial, a land-slip took place on the point of the shore, and the sea, flowing in, surrounded his tomb, and made it inaccessible to the foot of man. It bore this inscription:
Here am I laid, my life of misery done.
Ask not my name, I curse you every one.And this epitaph was made by himself while yet alive; another more generally known is actually by Callimachus:
Timon, the misanthrope, am I below.
Go, and revile me, traveller – but please go.Thus much of Timon, of whom much more might be said.
True to his nature, Shakespeare, reading in Plutarch (which was his source for almost all his ancient history) determined that it was his place to say much more of Timon, and so he did. He managed to use every detail in the Plutarch passage, though like Shakespeare some of it is oddly used and there is a great deal of historical inaccuracy. (Shakespeare apparently had difficulty distinguishing Greek and Roman names: he uses the Greek names such as Apemantus and Alcibiades given him by Plutarch, but in filling out his cast of characters he uses Roman names such as Lucullus and Ventidius and Sempronius.) He appears to have conjoined the story of the great misanthrope with a Poor-Richard-esque fable of a rich man who feasts his friends liberally, helps all who ask him, never inquires into his accounts, falls into debt, and finds that when he seeks to borrow of others he has no friends anymore (apparently from Lucian). This becomes the cause of Timon’s misanthropy.
Timon bears the distinction of being the least-performed of all of Shakespeare’s plays. There are some obvious reasons: the language is not beautiful, and all the quotable bits are harangues against the fundamentally whoring nature of mankind; there are no female characters; it is somewhat monotonously misanthropic. There are no scenes into which you can imagine yourself ever falling, because the plot is not news to anyone: we know that money cannot get us loyal friends, but since poverty cannot get us any friends at all, we must be resigned to making do with what friends and lovers success will bring us. (For those who want more from life, I know of no reliable recourse but God, and even He, to believe the preachers and priests, has a fondness for riches in a man.) Besides its moralistic simplicity, the play does not begin prepossessingly at all: its narrative technique, to begin in utter happiness, with endless scenes of feasting, is the simplest imaginable. No “in medias res” here. I began reading it, but found myself soon distracted. Reading these plays is not the way to experience them anyway.
And yet it chanced that just a week or so after reading Plutarch’s digression to a friend, who shared my interest in the man Timon – “there’s something in it,” she said – my mother told me that we should go see the simulcast from the National Theater in London – and sure enough, it was Timon of Athens. “Do you know anything about the play?” she asked. “I’ve never seen it, but I figured you might know about it because I know you’ve read a lot of that Greek and Roman stuff.” This seemed like Providence to me, so I made sure not to leave New York without seeing the play.
These simulcasts are an interesting new art form; I saw one, some years ago, of the Metropolitan Opera, broadcast in Virginia. This was the first time I had seen a play thus treated, and it was just as excellent – if not more so – than the opera. They are superbly photographed, from seemingly innumerable cameras and angles, many of the shots themselves beautifully artistic and all of them thoughtfully deployed. The London actors are of course like no others in our language, and it was a great pleasure to have the London theater beamed over to New York for a few Hamiltons. The show I saw was in the large (and very nice) NYU theater on Washington Square South – the regrettably named Skirball Center. I had never been there before, and I was charmed to see that it obviously had its own New York following – the (again, very large) theater was packed full of nice old Jewish people.
The play was set in modern times, with the modern corporate elite playing Timon and his friends, and the Occupy Wall Street people playing Alcibiades and the mob he brings to the walls of Athens. It was easy to see this as forced – the Occupy Wall Street people are a bit toothless compared to a Shakespearean mob – but I was entranced. The play opened in “the Timon Room” of a fine art museum – they used the font the Met uses – where Timon was giving a fabulous party in front of the massive, and extraordinary, El Greco of Christ driving the moneychangers from the temple. There artists and poets come to osculate the posterior of the rich and generous philanthropist. It was the very image of a society unhinged from its religious and artistic wisdom, worshipping, like the Egyptians of old, the moment’s possessor as Creator. Later when Timon praises a band of thieves, as living according to the rule of nature, I thought of Republican “maker-taker” ideology, which makes the rich man the maker and the creator, when Shakespeare knew he was just a thief after the pattern of nature:
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea. The moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun….
The Earth’s a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing’s a thief.
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Are unchecked theft. Love not yourselves, away,
Rob one another, there’s more gold, cut throats,
All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go,
Break open shops, nothing can you steal
But thieves do lose it.
Timon’s pattern was to give and give and give, to borrow to create more, and thus he was lionized as a generator of life and wealth, the author of the banquet. But of course to live this way led to literal bankruptcy. But the anxiety of our age, which the play tapped into, is a more general fear of bankruptcy: that our leaders and wealthy are morally bankrupt (as they are portrayed in Timon), that our social order is bankrupt, that our entire system of economics may be bankrupt. Wendell Berry says that the root of all economy is ecology; and if an ecological system cannot sustain the economy built upon it, that economy must collapse. No one who has at all studied the problem believes that our ecological system can sustain the economy built on it; and so the bankruptcy we fear in Timon is the bankruptcy of everything modern.
After Timon’s creditors come to settle accounts, he flees Athens:
Timon will to the Woods, where he shall finde
Th’unkindest Beast, more kinder than Mankinde.
There he lives on roots, but while digging for them, he discovers a hoard of gold, which makes him once more an object of interest to the Athenians. After he has given some of it away – for he does not want it for himself, as its value can only come through dealing with other men – thieves come to steal it from him. His exchange with them shows how a sick society cannot bear being returned to a state of simplicity:
Thieves. We are not thieves, but men that much do want.
Tim. Your greatest want is, you want much:
Why should you want? Behold, the Earth has roots:
Within this mile break forth a hundred springs:
The oaks bear mast, the briars scarlet hips,
The bounteous housewife nature, on each bush,
Lays her full mess before you. Want? Why want?
Thieves. We cannot live on grass, on berries, water,
As beasts, birds, and fishes.
Tim. Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds and fishes –
You must eat men.
In our case the even graver danger is that we cannot live on what the whole earth can now produce – we must like Timon eat the future as well, and bankrupt the entirety. But there is something about advanced society which simply cannot endure that we in all our glory do actually live on grass, berries, water, beasts, birds, and fishes. The awareness of this is somehow hostile to human pride, or to put it in Shakespeare’s archetypal language – for the beasts are the gods in disguise – “Feasts are too proud to give thanks to the Gods.”
Much of Timon’s life in the woods is an extended meditation on the whore archetype, our human willingness to sell ourselves for money. Once it is known that Timon has gold in the woods, the artists and senators return to him, where he gives them an earful.
Go on, here’s gold, go on:
Be as a planetary plague, when Jove
Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison
In the sick air: let not thy sword skip one:
Pity not honored age for his white beard,
He is a usurer. Strike me the counterfeit matron –
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself’s a bawd. Let not the virgin cheek
Make soft thy trenchant sword: for those milk paps
That through the window bore at men’s eyes,
Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
But set them down horrible traitors. Spare not the babe
Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy:
Think it a bastard, whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounced: the throat cut
And mince it sans remorse.
On gold:
This much of this will make
Black white; foul, fair; wrong, right;
Base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
Ha you gods! Why this? What this, you gods? Why this
Will lug your priest and servants from your sides:
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads.
This yellow slave,
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves,
And give them Title, Knee, and Approbation
With senators on the bench; this is it
That makes the wappened widow wed again;
She, whom the spittle-house, and ulcerous sores,
Would cast the gorge at.
My dictionary says that “wappened” “probably” means “outworn”; it is not otherwise known. And I have no idea what “casting the gorge” could mean, though the general sense is clear. Money is the elixir of love after all. This is specifically mentioned:
O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
Twixt natural sun and fire: thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed, thou valiant Mars,
Thou ever-young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap: thou Visible God.
There is something at least somewhat assuring in this, that greed is not a new problem. Looking at plays such as Timon and painters such as El Greco, we might assume that greed has become much worse in our age. In truth probably only our thinking about greed has gotten worse – we have rationalized it.
An excellent review in the Guardian notes that Timon has long been considered a “problem play,” meaning one whose purport is really quite unclear; but it seems that our age, by being a problem age, has made its meaning fairly clear. Moral, physical, religious, and economic bankruptcy is something we can all understand. Timon even clearly notes the problem of celebrity, which like the sirens’ song never fails to draw people and as often destroys them:
Oh the fierce wretchedness that Glory brings us!
Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt,
Since riches point to misery and contempt?
Who would be so mocked with glory, or to live
But in a dream of friendship,
To have his pomp, and all that state compounds,
But only painted like his varnished friends.
But Shakespeare is at his best when he notes that the problems appear to be insoluble. Even the life of the beasts – the life in the woods – ends up being no better. Apemantus comes to visit him in the woods, and in between some monotonous but occasionally ridiculously inexhaustible mutual hatred –
Ape. Beast.
Tim. Slave.
Ape. Toad.
Tim. Rogue.
– the two men have a discussion about what to do about it all:
Ape. What things in the world canst thou nearest compare to thy flatterers?
Tim. Women nearest; but men, mean are the things themselves. What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?
Ape. Give it to the beasts, to be rid of the men?
Tim. Wouldst thou have thy self fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?
Ape. Aye, Timon.
Tim. A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee to attain to. If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee; if thou were the ass, thy dulness would torment thee; and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf. If thou were the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner. Wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse; wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard. What beast could thou be, that were not subject to a beast?
And this is the horror that must make us worshippers of the unknown God or of nothing at all, that the evil in us is the evil that surrounds us.
I know I have an inner Timon in me – as when I pay some ridiculous bill or other, like the four hundred dollars I paid to an Arizona court for a cracked tail light. And it comes out at other times as well. Well now I know what to say the next time this happens:
There’s more gold.
Do you damn others, and let this damn you.
And ditches grave you all.
Back in the Woods.
14-Nov-12I returned to the Catskills last night, after a week and a half away, first in Ohio and then in New York City. It amazes me how when I am elsewhere I can feel the same angst and uncertainty that I feel all of us thinkers feel – and then I come back home to the mountains and feel I am the luckiest man alive. This even though I woke up this morning shivering with a fever, and had to wrap myself in furs in the light of the rising sun while rekindling the fire.
Mark Twain’s Grave on All Souls Day.
14-Nov-12
Downtown Elmira.
I wrote on this blog about a trip of mine to Hannibal, Missouri, the adorable little river-town where Mark Twain spent his boyhood. In our imaginations the writer is so associated with the Mississippi River that I believe it it something of a crime that he is not buried along its course. It is of course acceptable for a young man to go off and seek success in the big city; but the true heroic journey is always circular, and there is something wrong, even insulting, to know that the poet of the Mississippi spent most of his life far away from it, in East-Coast corridors of comfort and privilege, and he died and was buried in Elmira, New York, at the time a respectable bourgeois manufacturing center in New York’s Southern Tier.
And so when I happened to be spending a day passing through the region I knew where I would be stopping. I would close the circle and pay my respects to the tomb of the man born Samuel Clemens of Missouri.
A map of New York tells you little of what you will find on the ground: two cities that appear equal on the map may be entirely different, as I found years ago when I was charmed by Rochester and depressed by Syracuse; elated by the loveliness of Brockport and made pensive by the bleakness of Woodbourne. An old regional center can be elegant and promising like Kingston – or it can be broken-down and terminal like Elmira.
Downtown, looking south.
Elmira seems to have suffered the fate of many other nice towns, in that it maintained its importance into the 20th century: and so the wrecking-ball of progress destroyed what the automation of labor and the centrifugal sprawl of car culture could not. The old Main Street is lined with new buildings, graceless, boxy, cheap, where no one could live – there were no residences in them – and no one would want to do business (they also lacked shopfronts). Every single building I saw there built before World War II seemed worth keeping, and every one built after worth destroying. But the downtown area had probably been fifty percent remade since the war, which meant in practice that it had been fifty percent destroyed. One of the first places I saw was a one-story building from the 1960s or 70s which had been condemned by the city as “unfit for human habitation.” The only saving grace of that architectural era is that it did not build for the ages.
As often happens in such towns parking was abundant – in fact there were almost no cars – but all metered. Not knowing how long my pilgrimage to the Twain sites would take, and not willing to risk a ticket – the meters would take two hours’ worth of my money and no more – I parked at the far edge of downtown, in front of an old brick-Romanesque church with a German inscription in terra cotta: ERSTE DEUTSCHE EVANGELISCHE KIRCHE. I passed along a pair of blighted blocks, what once were buildings or yards turned into empty parking lots. One building had been the plaything of some churchman’s business ambitions: “Heavenly Touch Pastor Jones Fashions” and “Heavenly Touch Barber Shop.” “A cut above the rest,” it said. Both businesses had long since closed. On a Thursday afternoon I could not see another human being in any direction.
Elmira had been large enough to have multiple important streets – an entire grid as opposed to a single street or crossing of streets – and so the government buildings are scattered throughout the downtown. They are still functioning: county court, county offices, an impressive beaux-arts city hall, and a vast immaculate federal court. Along with the churches – which were multiple, massive, and impressive, though with a desolate air – the government seemed to be the only thing left in Elmira. There was something almost medieval about the persistence of church and state while the third estate dwindled away to insignificance.
I found an odd business still left, the photography studios of Personius-Warne, which boasted they they had been in place since 1893, in a brownstone in the center of town. It was now the only brownstone left, all the others having been bulldozed. In 1893 they had made glorious crisp silver prints of ladies in hoop skirts and men in seersucker; people like the Clemens family; now they did mostly high school portraits.
I turned north on Main Street, whose brownstone and brick had been replaced with au-courant commercial spaces, Rite-Aid and Walgreen’s and McDonald’s, with their familiar idiotic architectural graceless sameness. There were two Twain sites on my map: the “Mark Twain Study,” near Elmira College on the north end of town; and a few miles past that, his gravesite.
The appearance of the college was somewhat surprising to me: it had not been heralded by coffee shops, pizzerias, a bookshop, or any of the usual accoutrements of college-town living. Past the grimy gas station and equally grimy Chinese restaurant were a few houses and then suddenly the college, where fresh-faced undergraduates walked around, half of them dressed more neatly and respectably, and half dressed more slovenly and disreputably, than anyone else in town. Most of them were staring into their hands, presumably at iPhones.
The Twain study was, to my surprise, on the campus of the college. It was an enclosed octagonal gazebo, not more than twelve feet in diameter but quite spacious nonetheless, with glass windows on seven sides and a stone fireplace on the eighth. It had been built in 1874 at Twain’s request, and like many things of its era it conveyed in equal parts sturdiness and comfort. It was open only on weekends, but it was small and to peer through the window was to visit it. Here Twain wrote Tom Sawyer, and “other novels,” as the sign indicated. It was a fine space for a writer, small and cozy but big enough to converse or pace in. Its furnishings were simple: a few chairs, a table, a poker and ash-shovel and tongs, a guestbook, and a few mementoes of the author: a portrait, a few pictures, and a small marble statue, presumably of Joan of Arc (of whom Twain wrote a biography).
It had been moved to its current location – Americans have had a fair fetish for moving buildings with sentimental associations. The house where Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox was dismantled for a trip to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and spent a few decades in boxes before the National Parks Department laboriously reconstructed it; the Poe House and Hamilton Grange in New York were moved to make way for progress; and most spectacularly, London Bridge was purchased and moved to Lake Havasu City in Arizona. The Twain Study was built on Quarry Farm, the family home of Twain’s first wife, Olivia Langdon. The farm, some miles outside of town, was given to Elmira College decades ago, and now is a residence for writers and not generally open to the public; but some sage decided that the actual place where Twain had done his writing should be taken from the property and moved to a college campus, where it may look out not on pastoral quietude but an intermittent parade of nineteen-year-olds sending text messages.
Having taken a few photos and sat on the steps musing for awhile I set out for the graveyard. I had only the vaguest idea where it was. After walking more than a mile down what I thought was the right road I had some doubts; I could see the sidewalk disappear a few yards further. I spied a group of teenagers on tiny bicycles on a side street, and I yelled to them, asking if there was a graveyard down the road; they answered that it was not far off. A little more walking brought me to it soon enough as they had affirmed, and while most of the graves seemed recent, I did not doubt it was the right place. It was large and parklike, the way a late nineteenth century graveyard should be. There was no easy point of access, so I hopped over the wrought-iron fence in a place where it was relatively low. This was wise, as the fence got higher and the front gate turned out to be locked. I saw another teenager, this one passing through the cemetery, his face blank and his soul withdrawn into his headphones. I asked him if he knew where the grave of Mark Twain was. He took off his headphones and looked at me quizzically.
“I said do you know where the grave of Mark Twain is?”
His face knotted with uncertain recognition. “Hmm…” he turned around and looked at the hill of graves behind him. “… I think it’s somewhere over there.” His arm was waving to a large hill that overlooked the road – a logical place for the fancy graves to be anyway. It seemed likely enough. I thanked him and headed uphill, while he tucked the buds into his ears again.
At the top of the hill I found the obelisks and angels which indicated I was in high-class grave territory, and in a relatively artistic age. Down below I had passed a grave that had a stone golfball carved onto its top, which seemed to me, like people, equal parts ridiculously entertaining and sadly superficial. Up on top of the hill, however, I found an intriguing statue of an inspired poet, pen in hand looking into the distance – in fact right at Twain’s grave – with the inscription:
Write from henceforth.
I heard
a voice from heaven
saying unto me
Write
from henceforth
blessed are the
dead who die in
the Lord.
Twain’s grave was not far away, and a small sign directed me in no uncertain terms.
His plot is a family plot, in a grove of fine white oaks, where a pillar indicates that there are laid the remains of the Langdons, his first wife’s family. Twain is there, along with his two wives, three daughters, a granddaughter, and a son-in-law, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who apparently attempted to be an artist himself. While Twain’s grave says merely:
Twain's grave.
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS
– MARK TWAIN –
NOV.30,1835 – APR.21,1910
Gabrilowitsch, whose stone is identical, merits further the lapidary comment, awkwardly distributed over the stone:
OSSIP GABRILOWITSCH
REFLECTED IN HIS ART AND IN
HIS LIFE THE NOBLE BEAUTY OF
HIS LOFTY IDEALS
A nearby stele features bronze medallions of both Twain and Gabrilowitsch. The latter man may have been known in his day, but compared with the fame of Twain he seems like the very Bibulus of the dead: Bibulus, the unhappy consular colleague of Julius Caesar, was such a nonentity that even while he was in office people referred to his administration with Caesar as “the consulship of Julius and Caesar.”
The stones of Twain’s wife and children are indicative of the man’s inner sentimentality which was forever the sad root of his embittered humor.
IN THIS GRAVE REPOSE THE ASHES OF
OLIVIA LANGDON CLEMENS
THE BELOVED AND LAMENTED WIFE OF
SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
WHO REVERENTLY RAISES THIS STONE
TO HER MEMORY
ELMIRA,NOV.27,1845
FLORENCE,ITALY,JUNE 5,1904
“GOTT SEI DIR GNAEDIG, O MEINE WONNE.”
“God be gracious to thee, o my joy.”
OLIVIA SUSAN CLEMENS
MAR.19,1872 – AUG.18,1896
WARM SUMMER SUN SHINE KINDLY HERE,
WARM SUMMER WIND BLOW SOFTLY HERE,
GREEN SOD ABOVE
LIE LIGHT, LIE LIGHT –
GOOD NIGHT, DEAR HEART,
GOOD NIGHT, GOOD NIGHT.
– ROBERT RICHARDSON
IN MEMORY OF
JEAN LAMPTON CLEMENS
A MOST DEAR DAUGHTER
HER DESOLATE FATHER
SETS THIS STONE.
“AFTER LIFE’S FITFUL FEVER
SHE SLEEPS WELL.”
JULY 26,1880 – DEC.24,1909
Twain might have used any of these inscriptions in his famed works, but only in mockery.
The Langdon (Twain) family grave.
I placed a native thistle on his grave, which I brought from Wildcat Mountain; it was as near I could come to his nature in a tribute: thorny, weedy, homespun, but beautiful in its own way and (in the species I chose) rare.
At the gravesite I found a letter placed under a rock, which I took the liberty of reading; it was addressed to Twain, written by a local artist who was attempting to fulfill Twain’s (tongue-in-cheek) plan of dedicating a statue to Adam, as the founder of pretty much everything human. Twain noted that with all the Darwinism running around people were likely to forget the importance of Adam to human history. The artist is correct, in that Twain’s idea, like so much of his humor, has remained relevant to American life to this day. Unfortunately the proper place for such a statue is probably not Elmira but Missouri, where it legitimately could become a rallying-point for the Christian-American rage against its own animal nature. And Joseph Smith tells us that Missouri is the site of the Garden of Eden, which would make a statue there all the more appropriate. And I may presume that Adam’s grave, due to technological limitations of the time, must be within walking distance of the garden itself.
The artist attempting to get the statue built clearly shared Twain’s humor, as he closed his letter (asking for assistance for a foundering project) by imploring him, “Don’t just lay there – do something.”
The only other tribute at Twain’s grave were coins – a penny and a nickel on his, a dime on his wife’s, and on his daughter’s stone a quarter – which I must confess I did not understand. Where they have gone, there is no ferryman to take fares. But I took them as a sad emblem of the thing which had brought Twain, as perhaps it brought Adam and his descendants, to forsake his hometown and forsake it forever. Twain was out for success – and he found it, but like so many others before him somehow it turned out to be more ashen-tasting to his palate than he could ever have imagined. As an artist he recognized that even though he was writing in Elmira everything he could ever possibly effectively write about was elsewhere. For Twain’s body to rest in Elmira is testament to the meaninglessness of success, which Twain all too keenly felt but could never come to grips with. There was no other ideal to live by. Living by it you are brought to places that have no inner meaning – that make no sense.
Main Street Elmira, looking north.
Hemingway said of Twain that all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn, a statement I cannot second. (My favorite American writers, Irving and Thoreau, preceded it, as do Melville and Whitman. In fact I would say that Huckleberry Finn is more contained in Walden than vice versa). But an American literary tradition definitely does come from Twain, of the writer from the provinces heading to the coasts to court success, and writing with an eye by turns loving and exploitative of the people he grew up with. Crucial to these writers is their sense that they are better than their cradles – which gives them tremendous energy to set out seeking their treasure and no place to go once they have acquired it. Brooklyn is full of these people, and the problem is still the same.
Standing there staring at the gray granite monuments, I thought of Washington Irving, the greatly underrated American writer whose writings Twain must have known well – and on which he must have had some unkind opinion or other. Irving had maintained his capacity for loyalty and earnestness to the end, despite success and sorrow. He lived, as so many intelligent Americans must, abroad for years, but he returned to the river he loved, built a house to his own specifications, and bought a grave-plot in Sleepy Hollow, in the very graveyard which he made haunted with his Headless Horseman. Even while he was living in England he knew that this is the proper circular course of the pride of success, which in the end must acknowledge its sorry and pitiful and human and humble beginnings. Irving had made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare is buried, the famed malediction on his grave having prevented his remains being transferred to Westminster Abbey. Irving may justly be accused of having limitations as a writer, but the close of his essay on Stratford was utterly beyond the range of a much more naturally gifted wordsmith like Twain.
As I crossed the bridge on my return, I paused to contemplate the distant church in which the poet lies buried, and could not but exult in the malediction, which has kept his ashes undisturbed in its quiet and hallowed vaults. What honor could his name have derived from being mingled in dusty companionship with the epitaphs and escutcheons and venal eulogiums of a titled multitude? What would a crowded corner in Westminster Abbey have been, compared with this reverend pile, which seems to stand in beautiful loneliness as his sole mausoleum! The solicitude about the grave may be but the offspring of an overwrought sensibility; but human nature is made up of foibles and prejudices; and its best and tenderest affections are mingled with these factitious feelings. He who has sought renown about the world, and has reaped a full harvest of worldly favor, will find, after all, that there is no love, no admiration, no applause, so sweet to the soul as that which springs up in his native place. It is there that he seeks to be gathered in peace and honor among his kindred and his early friends. And when the weary heart and failing head begin to warn him that the evening of life is drawing on, he turns as fondly as does the infant to the mother’s arms, to sink to sleep in the bosom of the scene of his childhood.
How would it have cheered the spirit of the youthful bard, when, wandering forth in disgrace upon a doubtful world, he cast back a heavy look upon his paternal home; could he have foreseen that, before many years, he should return to it covered in renown; that his name should become the boast and glory of his native place; that his ashes should be religiously guarded as its most precious treasure; and that its lessening spire, on which his eyes were fixed in tearful contemplation, should one day become the beacon, towering amidst the gentle landscape, to guide the literary pilgrim of every nation to his tomb.
Coming back into downtown Elmira.
That kind of veneration Hannibal had for Twain; I had seen it with my own eyes, and seen how Twain’s ghost had made Hannibal a fine town – now nicer than Elmira, and a stopping-place for literary pilgrims indeed. But Twain had pursued other goals – and admittedly, in this country hometown loyalty is not one of the easier virtues. Even if you return to your hometown you may find that it has been utterly remade in your absence – the old buildings on Main Street torn down, and your more talented friends gone to seek their fortunes elsewhere. And so having seen what there was to see in the graveyard I picked my solitary way down through the graves, back over the wrought-iron fence, along the road that had no sidewalk, and back into the ugly remains of Elmira, where I got into my truck and continued on my westward way.
Elmira, New York, old and new.
Heavenly Touch.
11-Nov-12
Pastor Jones Fashions, Elmira, New York. Shuttered.
Just Being Part of It.
04-Nov-12Walking around in some of the black neighborhoods of Cleveland I find myself thinking of this Crowded House song:
I’m not lying –
Or asking for anything –
I just want to be there.
Doing this kind of work – knocking on doors, most of which don’t get answered – you don’t feel terribly important. But that’s okay. You don’t want to be important – you just want to be there.
The Racially Conscious Society.
16-Nov-12Above is the electoral map for Mitt Romney among white men. Even in states like California and New York, white men voted for Romney. Identity is crucial in presidential politics, but there is some danger that our society will continue to amp up these kinds of divides, and that elections will be more and more about male versus female, Anglo versus Hispanic, black versus white. The fact that one political party seems bent on being the White Male Party seems all the more likely to entrench this divide.
This kind of awareness has now surfaced in the Virginia State Board of Education, which is trying to implement different score goals depending on your race:
At some point, we are going to have to look into ways of transcending race in this country. This is really not good, when state-level educators are producing racist state standards.