Eric The Blue

Speaking of Thoreau,

try to supply the missing adverb in this sentence from Walden:  "I went to the woods because I wished to live more _______________."  When I studied Thoreau at the University of Minnesota back in the 1980s, the instructor, John Dolan, hypothesized that casual readers of Walden would be at least ten times more likely to supply a wrong answer--"earnestly," "intensely," "honestly," etc.--than the word Thoreau wrote, which is "deliberately."

Here is the passage Schwinger alluded to in praising Feynman:  "If a man does not keep pace with his companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."  Having called our attention to "deliberately," Professor Dolan submitted that it would be a mistake to suppose that the sentence about the drummer might be paraphrased "If a man is out of step with his fellows. . . ."  For the sentence plainly places the out-of-step man behind his companions.  He is, one could say, more deliberate.

Slow down!  Take your time!  Think--for yourself!  Much of the advice imparted by Walden is captured in these simple exhortations. 

Is there a concordance to Walden, like there is for the Bible and the works of Shakespeare?  I'd be interested in seeing entries for the forms of "deliberate."  Oh, well, I'll just reread the book.

Fine men

I've been spending my morning coffee breaks reading, with great pleasure, the letters of Richard Feynman, collected and edited by his daughter, Michelle.  Probably it says more about me than it does about Feynman, but I have thought, ever since I held the volume in my hand, of Henry David Thoreau.   There is the title, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, lifted from a letter criticizing the kind of mathematics education that penalizes students for solving problems in novel ways not authorized by their textbooks.  I think his daughter must have chosen the phrase for her title because she thought it captured her father's approach to all of life, and the words would not seem out of place in a letter of Thoreau's, either.  Then, on the back cover, in one of the advertising blurbs, Julian Schwinger deploys possibly the most famous metaphor in Walden to describe Feynman, his fellow Nobel laureate in physics in 1965:  "An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."

There is much between the covers that seems similarly Thoreauvian--the contempt for "uniforms" and all types of "authorities," the insistently repeated exhortation to "think for yourself," the refusal of honorary degrees, the indifference toward money, a somewhat cranky public spiritedness, and, very specifically, a letter he wrote his mother on August 30, 1954--look it up or, if at all inclined, get the book and read the whole thing.

Family values, here and there

While Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, has gone into seclusion following the revelation that he patronized Pamela Martin and Associates, a D.C. call girl service, here in Minnesota another family values conservative, Mark Olson, Republican state legislator from Big Lake, took the stand in his own defense against charges that he beat his wife last November 12, a Sunday, after returning home from church in the afternoon.  Olson testified that he had hung up on his wife earlier in the day when she telephoned to scold him about something, and now they began to wrestle after she confronted him while he worked in the garage. 

"I didn't let go because I didn't want to hurt her.  I just wanted it [the discord] to stop," Olson said, weeping as he testified, according to the account of the Star Tribune.  His wife's version of events was not that different, though she did say her husband had pushed her down three times, not once as the legislator said. She also testified that he had threatened to "finish the job" before he left.

There is apparently a history of reciprocal assaults involving Bible-throwing between the legislator and his wife.  Olson's lawyer had hinted at introducing a battered husband defense, and Heidi Olson, 50, who according to the the newspaper article is "larger than her husband," admitted once hitting him.  But she said he had assaulted her on several occasions, once for example when he threw two Bibles at her, apparently hitting her with at least one of them, since she claimed to have been bruised. 

Olson's answer is that his wife was in the habit of throwing Bibles at him, and, in an effort to show her how that felt, he had taken to throwing Bibles at her, too.  "The first time she threw the Bible, I couldn't understand what I did to cause this," he testified.  "I abhorred it, and then I found myself doing the same thing."

The next day, after a jury convicted him of intending to cause his wife to fear he would hurt her, but acquitting on the more serious charge of actually hurting her, Olson told reporters that he loved his wife and was hoping for a reconciliation. Heidi issued a statement in which she forgave her husband.  Indications are that he will return to the legislature, where his Bible-tossing is merely metaphoric in nature.

Some Hemingway stories

I re-read the story called "Soldier's Home" and found it not as good as I remembered.  Though only a few pages long I feel it could have been cut almost in half.  This is often the case in Hemingway.  Scott Fitzgerald tried to persuade him to lop off several pages at the start of The Sun Also Rises, and either failed entirely or was insufficiently successful: the novel really begins with chapter 3.  The story called "Indian Camp," one of the earliest Nick Adams stories both with respect to date of composition and the character's probable age, is an instance of successful cutting.  The original version included a section, published as "Three Shots" in The Nick Adams Stories, that was removed from the version published in In Our Time.  The story is very much better for it but see if you cannot detect, in the opening sentences, the absence of something that formerly came before:

At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up.  The two Indians stood waiting.

What two Indians?  We are beginning "in the middle of things" and the remainder has a force of almost mythic intensity that it would have been impossible to achieve with the talky first part still in place.

Having dipped into the book I had to read a few other stories as well.  The very best are very brief.  The two finest are, arguably, "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."  For an explication of the latter, check out John Berryman's essay on the story in The Freedom of the Poet--it's a tour de force of criticism and insight.  In the former, a young man and his woman friend have drinks at a train station while traveling in Spain.  The conversation gives an idea of what kind of life they have been leading together--the girl notes, at one point, that all they do is "look at things and try new drinks."  The man is oblivious to her disquietude and soon begins trying to talk her into having an abortion.  It is quite a slippery onslaught on his part and the woman, unimpressed, her disquietude becoming unbearable, asks him to please stop talking--and she repeats "please" seven times.  Not long before that she had interrupted the conversation by taking a short stroll.

   The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station.  Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro.  Far away, beyond the river, were mountains.  The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

At the end, their next train is about to arrive, so the man moves their bags and goes in the bar to have one alone.  Upon his return, he asks the girl if she feels better, and her answer ends the story.

"I feel fine," she said.  "There's nothing wrong with me.  I feel fine."

As the waiter in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" realizes, some live in it but never feel it--the "it" being nada, the nothing that he (and she) know all too well.