So while I do all I can to encourage and nurture their voices, styles, and expertise, I teach my students what matters to me -- the Havard comma, Homer, poetic line breaks, Linda Pastan, character development, S.E. Hinton, conventions for indicatinig titles, Walter Dean Myers, Elizabethan theatre, Wallace Stevens, thank-you letters, when to double the final consonant before adding a suffix, Donald Murray, how to take notes on a documentary film, Cynthia Rylant, designing interview questions, Langston Hughes, memorizing poetry, Dave Barry, using narrative to make sense of the conditions of our lives, why I write and read.
Nancie Atwell, Cultivating our Garden
On September 8, 1999, a thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles police officer named Rafael Perez, who had been caught stealing a million dollars' worth of cocaine from police evidence-storage facilities, signed a plea bargain in which he promised to help uncover corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department. Perez hinted at a scandal that could involve perhaps five other officers, including a sergeant. Later, Perez began to talk about a different magnitude of corruption&emdash;wrongdoing that he claimed was endemic to special police units such as the one on which he worked, combatting gangs in the city's dangerous Rampart district. Perez declared that bogus arrests, perjured testimony, and the planting of "drop guns" on unarmed civilians were commonplace. Perez's story unfolded over a period of months, and ignited what came to be known as the Rampart scandal, which the Los Angeles Times called "the worst corruption scandal in L.A.P.D. history."
Peter Boyer, The New Yorker, May 21, 2001
For those who regard theatergoing as blood sport, it promised to be the event of the season. A budget of $11 million; a world-famous composer new to the Broadway musical and openly contemptuous of its traditions; a protracted period of previews replete with tales of desperate last-minute revisions, a frenzied parade of advice-dispensing show doctors: 'The Capeman,' Paul Sion's pop-operatic retelling of a street-gang murder in 1959, seemed to have all the elements that make theater-disaster cultists drool.
The process of learning is essential to our lives. All higher animals seek it deliberately. They are inquisitive and they experiment. An experiment is a sort of harmless trial run of some action which we shall have to make in the real world; and this, whether it is made in the laboratory by scientists or by fox cubs outside their earth. The scientist experiments and the cub plays; both are learning to correct their errors of judgment in a setting in which errors are not fatal. Perhaps this is what gives them both their air of happiness and freedom in these activities.
I've been here more than a decade and have watched the gentle decline of many a beautiful building into a sort of sorpor, lines dulled, decaying. The wiring shorts, leaving telltale patches of charred paint. The plumbing dribbles, beams rot, porches sag, gutters jam so that rain and rotten leaves spill a streak of green down the walls. Termites chunnel from end to end, roots upheave walkways, bees nest in chimneys, plaster crumbles to pillars of dust, slate tile shatters on the roof, and misery trickles in. A contagion of desutetude spreads through our turn-of-the-century neighborhoods. How wonderful, then, that people are able to see the beauty of the old bones, recognize the value of the old materials, old ways of building. They come to the rescue.
Dominique Browning, House and Garden, April '98
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces ,
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
Truman Capote, 'Breakfast at Tiffany's, opening paragraph.
I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy's hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.
Truman Capote, 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.'
When Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee recently, a Times editorial writer compared the event to the famous hearings a century ago involving John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Standard Oil, the giant trust that he founded and that, at one time, refined almost nine out of every ten barrels of oil pumped from the American earth. It wasn't the first time that Gates and Rockefeller had been set side by side. A few months ago, Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who works for several of Microsoft's rivals, declared, 'The only thing that Rockefeller did that Bill Gates hasn't done is use dynamite against his competitors." That was hyperbole -- the allegation that Standard Oil agents blew up a rival refinery has never been proved -- but there are at least some parallels between the two targets of Reback's venom: both Rockefeller and Gates were self-made men who created companies that dominated major industries; both became almost unimaginably rich; both inspired admiration and loathing in about equal measure; and both irked the Justice Department.
John Cassidy, 'Rich Man, Richer Man', The New Yorker, May 11, 1998.
Apart from teaching him Latin, Stratford grammar school taught Shakespeare nothing at all. It did not teach him mathematics or any of the natural sciences. It did not teach him history, unless a few pieces of information about ancient events strayed in through Latin quotations. It did not teach him geography, for the first (and most inadequate) textbook on geography did not appear until the end of the century, and maps and atlases were rare even in university circles. It did not teach him modern languages, for when a second language was taught at a grammar school it was invariably Greek.
The way a person speaks can tell us many things in addition to the message he is aware of communicating. Users of a flat A tell us that they were probably raised somewhere in the Middle West.This may not be so, however, since radio and television are spreading the flat A throughout the land.The adult who uses slang on every occasion is probably telling us not to consider him a "square."By his display, he might also be telling us that only too recently he was one.And the stumbling verbal gropings of the rebellious young are meant to assure us that the speakers are sincere.Presumably, only hypocrites are capable of eloquence.
A few years ago, when Max opened a book, he chewed his shirt and crumpled his shoelaces into a ball; then, sitting on the bed, he rolled backward, holding the book in the air, his legs and bottom up in the air, too; then he fell to his side and put his face down on the book as if he were examining some bugs in the grass. He seemed eager to come at the book from some angle, underneath it, from the side perhaps, or behind it; sometimes he would fall into a rage and throw the book down. As I watched this, my adoration of him only grew, but I also felt licked: The media, it turned out, fed his temperamental quirks just fine. He had no trouble, I told myself petulantly, sitting still for Billy Joel and cartoons, for war movies and wrestling, for video and computer games, and all the things that operated at his tempo. They knew how to keep him interested, and how to sell him products at the same time. It was time to fight back.
Denby, David Great Books , p. 74.
How I longed for an extra hour to read! I would dream of it at night. On the weekend, when I dropped one of my sons off to play at a friend's house -- that was a good time. I would settle in at a nearby coffee shop and drink harsh, overboiled coffee, which sent a rush to my brain. I was launched. But a few minutes later, I would get lost, because the 'easy listening' radio station or the talk show the restaurant was piping into the room would now attach themselves to Locke's words and dislodge my attention. The music and talk filled every public space in America, the coffee shops, elevators, stores, malls, lobbies, even some of the pretentious 'atriums' that had sprung up in mid-Manhattan corporate headquarters, huge glass-enclosed spaces with pale green, drapelike trees. Passing through the trees, like fog, was the sheen of electronic violins.
Denby, David Great Books, p. 195.
When [Marco Pierre] White went into business on his own, he offered a startling and sensual menu drawn from the far extremes of the classical French repertoire. Pigeon de Bresse, for example, was stuffed with foie gras and truffles and served en vessie (in a pig's bladder), while noisette of lamb was presented en crepinette (in the filigree caul that enclosed its intestines). The London Times restaurant critic Jonathan Meades visited Harvey's in its very early days. "I had brains en gelee, followed by rabbit in langoustine sauce," he told me, "and it was like the first time I read a sentence by Nabokov. I knew that this was it -- the works." For A.A. Gill, the restaurant critic of the Sunday Times , White's cooking was "passionate, like receiving a love letter." Gill had arrived at Harvey's for lunch at midday, dressed in a morning suit and intending to be at a wedding by 3 P.M., but he was still at his table eight hours later. "I remember Marco rushing out with a frying pan of puy lentils, caramelized onions, and foie gras, and pouring the whole lot onto my plate," he says. "'What does it taste of?' he kept saying. 'What is it? What is it?' and I said that I didn't know. 'It's chidhood,' he said. 'It's the taste of childhood.'"
Luke Jennings, 'Bad Boy in the Kitchen,' The New Yorker, 4/27/98
I looked at Sinbad. He was just my little brother. I hated him. He never wiped his nose. He cried. He wet the bed. He got away with not eating his dinner. He had to wear specs with one black lens. He ran to get the ball. No one else did that. They all waited for it to come to them. He went through them all no bother. He was brilliant. He wasn't selfish like most fellahs who could dribble. It was weird, looking at him. It was great, and I wanted to kill him. You couldn't be proud of your little brother.
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
I'd hold my arms out straight till they ached and I'd spin. I could feel the air against my arms, trying to stop them from going so fast, like dragging them through water. I kept going. Eyes open, little steps in a circle; my heels cut into the grass, made it juicy; really fast -- the house, the kitchen, the hedge, the back, the other hedge, the apple tree, the house, the kitchen, the hedge, the back -- waiting to stop my feet. I never warned myself. It just happened -- the other hedge, the apple tree, the house, the kitchen -- stop -- onto the ground, on my back, sweating, gasping, everything still spinning. The sky -- round and round -- nearly wanting to get sick. Wet from sweating, cold and hot. Belch. I had to lie there till it was over. Round and round; it was better with my eyes open, trying to get my eyes to hang onto one thing and stop it from turning. Snot, sweat, round, round and round. I didn't know why I did it; it was terrible -- maybe that was why. It was good getting there -- spinning. Stopping was the bad bit, and after. It had to come; I couldn't spin forever. Recovering. Stuck to the ground. I could feel the world turning. Gravity sticking me down, holding me, my shoulders; my shins sore. The world was round and Ireland was stuck on the side; I knew that when I was spinning -- falling off the world. The worst was when there was nothing in the sky, nothing to grab, blue blue blue.
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
The recency of much knowledge is astonishing when one stops to consider it. Millions of men are still living who could have seen Darwin. The man who discovered that germs cause disease died in 1910. The father of antiseptic surgery lived until 1912. Pavlov was living in 1936, Freud in 1939. It was not until 1875 that the essential nature of the act of fertilization was understood, and not until the 1920's that the various hormones were isolated. Only in the past two decades has the study of animal behavior been put on a scientific basis. Our knowledge of prehistoric man is almost entirely a twentieth-century affair, and an awareness of how much that knowledge affects our knowledge of ourselves seems destined to wait until the twenty-first or later.
Behind him the white man was shouting, 'My horse! Fetch my horse!" and he thought for an instant of cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weedchoked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, strained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying 'Pap! Pap!', running again before he knew he had begun to run stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, 'Father! Father!'
William Faulkner, Barn Burning
Once ( it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts. One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes -- an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but at the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels -- the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such -- whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarised statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it ) and retailed for money and which on actual application proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trusties) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blinid fount where he had met justice and been hurled back and down): using he mails to defraud: who felt that he had been defrauded by the third-class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.
William Faulkner, Old Man
Re the Reading Room of the British Museum
Leaving was like ending a love affair. Memory calls up involuntary details: summer afternoon light through the blue dome, the expanse of space above me, the touch of worn blue leather underneath my writing blotter, the antique metal arm that folded out to hold my book, the passion of observation, the intoxication of discovery. I pay homage to the Reading Room every time I go back to London, never walking through the tall doors without the feeling that I have entered sacred space. There has never been, and will never be, another place like it. Not merely because Bernard Shaw taught himself to write here, not because George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and Isadora Duncan made themselves at home among the Elgin Marbles and Anglo-Saxon shields, but because the extraordinary marriage of museum and library belonged to an era that held a different idea of what knowledge was. When the rare 'paradoxical frog' and medieval manuscripts kept company in the early British Museum, inquiry was a less divided sphere. The knowable world is divided into countless disciplines now.
Angeline Goreau, NYT Book Review, 11/16/97
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim.
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, 233.
Words are with us everywhere. In our erotic secrecies, in our sleep. We're often no more aware of them than our own spit, although we use them oftener than legs. So of course in the customary shallow unconscious sense, we comprehend the curse, the prayer, and the whoop. We've heard roars of rage as raw as grubbed-up roots, and hunger's whimper from at least the dog. We've digested suave excuses like iced cake, and gotten sick on slander, drunk on lies. With words we follow the metaled links of honest argument and harken with the same ear to the huckster's pitch and the king's command. Because of words, deep designs can be licked from a shallow dish, although not a few false promises, grandly served, are soon flat as a warm drink. Yet they lift our spirits -- these poor weak words. They guide and they coerce. They settle fights, initiate disputes, compound errors, elicit truth. How long have we known it? They gather dust, too, and spoil in jokes which draw our laughter like the flies.
William H. Gass, Habitations of theWord
The science fiction stories meant almost nothing to me but I couldn't resist the detective pulps: Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flynn's Detective Fiction, and Popular Detective. The drawings were dark, as full of shadows as the movie melodramas of the period, and the men, women, and guns were interchangeable. The stories carried titles like 'Hellcats of Homicide Highway' or 'Sinner Take All,' but often the writing was a lot better than the titles or the illustrations. The stories took place in a landscape I understood: not sagebrush or the plains of Venus, but bad parts of mean towns, where the streetlights were always dim, the cops always crooked, and nobody had a home. The heroes were tough guys, able to absorb ferocious beatings before shooting their enemeies without remorse; they'd have felt little sympathy for Frankie Nocera or the Fat Boy. Almost all the women were bad: devious Delilahs, greedy, selfish, and dangerous. They worked in bars, hotels, the streets, and they usually went to bed with a man only to cut his throat. In a way, this vision of women was a perfect fit with the sinful temptress portrayed by the Church. Naturally, I wished I could meet one of them.
Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life, 130.
One January afternoon, after five sober years, I went for another walk in the snow. The children were home in the big house on Prospect Park West, and if I had not yet repaired some of the damage I'd inflicted on them and others, I was trying, I was trying. I wandered into the park, which was whitening under the heavy snowfall. And stood under a dense pine tree and then imagined figures coming down hills and across snowy meadows. Down there by the lake, Maureen Crowley was waiting for me on a bench. Over in the boathouse, Burne Hogath was explaining trapezoids and Laura was in a blue smock, pulling heavy drags on a cigarette, while snow skirled like fog. In the snow, my mother was calling us home to dinner. Tim was there and Billy and Jake, all of us laughing, bellywhopping on Suicide Hill before heading for Boop's, and Jose was jogging down snowy roads, and Joel Oppenheimer was defiantly smoking his black tobacco cigarettes while snow gathered on his Mets cap. Beside the Swan Lake, the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys were gathering in some violent ritual of the tribe. Up on the hill beside the Quaker Cemetery, Bomba the Jungle Boy was waiting out the winter beside a fire in a cave.
Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life , p.265.
Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes. He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas. Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.
Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River: part II
He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went away slowly, the feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the thrill that made his shoulders ache. It was all right now. His rod lying out on the logs, Nick tied a new hook on the leader, pulling the gut tight until it grimped into itself in a hard knot.
Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River: part II
Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River: part II
One Friday in New York, I watched Pandolfini give lessons to two of his students. I met him first at the East Village apartment he has had since 1976--"my inner sanctum," he calls it--a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room with an attached kitchenette and a small bathroom and closet. The kitchen is unusable, the stove and refrigerator blocked by a three-foot-high mound of running shoes, baseball cards, philosophy books, chess books, and posters from "Searching for Bobby Fischer." The main room is a nest of papers, books, and stacks of video and audio tapes--lectures on everything from the theory of general relativity to the origins of Romantic poetry--that reach three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. During the day, Pandolfini keeps his mattress in the closet so that there is room to move around. The answers to most questions you could ask about chess history are somewhere in his piles;today, he was rooting through the mess trying to find a 1964 chess magazine with a cover photo of George C. Scott playing chess with Stanley Kubrick on the set of "Dr. Strangelove."
Paul Hoffman, The Pandolfini Defense, The New Yorker, June 4, 2001.
A green and pleasant England with ample space to breathe, the sound of birdsong and church bells, the sharp smell of drifting wood-smoke on an autumn evening -- life in the year 1000 can be evoked with some powerfully attractive images, and they are complemented by the mesmerically beautiful treasures that have been recovered from Anglo-Saxon churches and archaeological sites: two delicately entwined ivory angels from Winchester, twisting and fluttering heavenwards like the double propeller of a sycamore seed; a walrus tusk, now in Liverpool Museum, that must have been carved sometime very close to 1000 A.D., with two cheeky sheep peering out from below the manger of the Christ child; and from the tomb of the great Archbishop Wulfstan, who died in 1023 A.D., an exquisitely slender bronze cloak pin -- the very pin, presumably, with which he fastened his vestments before mounting to the pulput -- with a minuscule latticework of tracery etched onto its diamond-shaped head. The craftsmanship could not be bettered today.
Robert Lacey, The Year 1000, p. 193
The rule that governs any self-respecting box of old Lego is that it should contain not just single bricks but the exciting debris of half-made projects: a three-wheeled chassis, a robot's lonely torso, a plastic Piranesi ruin. I find it heartbreaking to comb through the bricks of my childhood -- not because the click of stud into hole promises, like the uneven flagstones in the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion, a Proustian retrieval of lost bliss but simply because I am touched to discover that even when I was six my engineering concepts were crap. Lego posed a formidable challenge: being essentially curveless, it seldom bothered with anything as fancy as aerodynamics. That was how we liked it, of course. Roundness was for slackers.
Anthony Lane, The Joy of Bricks, The New Yorker, 4/27/98
Apple, pear, plum, fig, quince, peach, and mulberry trees all featured in the garden plan of one grand monastery designed, though never actually built, for Ireland's missionary monks on the shore of Lake Constance in Switzerland. St. Benedict's command that monks should not consume meat was interpreted by most communities to mean meat from red-blooded, four-legged animals, so poultry was considered immune from the prohibition, as were rabbits, which the Normans brought to England after 1066. But the monastic diet still tended to the noncarnivorous, with a high dairy content and a healthy proportion of nuts. The monks of St. Gall planned to grow chestnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, and walnuts on their estate, and when it came to vegetables, their kitchen garden made allowance for onions, leeks, celery, radish, carrots, garlic, shallots, parsnip, cabbage, parsley, dill, chervil, marigold, coriander, poppy, and lettuce.
Robert Lacey, The Year 1,000: What Life was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium. 135-136.
Dick goes out on the leveled stream and lays down harnesses in the snow. The sled is packed, the gear lashed under skins. Everything is ready for the dogs. They are barking, roaring, screaming with impatience for the run. One by one, Donna unchains them. Out of the trees they dash toward the sled. Chipper goes first and, standing in front, holds all the harnesses in a good taut line. Abie, Little Girl, Grandma, Ug -- the others fast fill in. They jump in their traces, can't wait to go. If they jump too much, they get cuffed. Wait another minute and they'll have everything so twisted we'll be here another hour. Go! The whole team hits at once. The sled, which was at rest a moment before, is moving fast. Destination, Eagle; time, two days.
John McPhee, "Coming into the Country"
We take a clearer look at the stream. If ever there was moose country, it is Umbazooksus Stream -- with its broad meanders through fields of sedge, its occasional dead standing trees. The stream is quiet and protected, surrounded by forest. We decide that we are going to see a moose here. We will stop paddling, stop talking, and stay until a moose shows up or the stream freezes. We settle down to wait. Stillness envelops us. It is the stillness of a moose intending to appear.
John McPhee, "Survival of the Bark Canoe"
In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines.
Gibbon, "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
The penises in Bhutan amazed me, there were so many of them. I didn't see them right away when I arrived in the Kingdom of Bhutan's one airport, a narrow drive shaved into the Paro Valley's shaggy green grass. I might not have noticed them, anyway, because I was so woozy from the flight -- the scariest one in regularly scheduled commercial aviation, mastered by fewer than a dozen pilots in the world, which requires a right-hand turn at Mt. Everest and then a sort of swooning, tree-trimming slide through the high Himalayas to the airstrip. I was so preoccupied with making landfall that I didn't take note of anything about the airport, really, not even the paintings of curly-tailed dragons and birds, whose beaks are curved like meat hooks, and blue poppies and auspicious Buddhist symbols -- conch shells and endless knots and golden fish.
Susan Orleans, 'Fertile Ground,' The New Yorker, June 7, 1999
Every boat has a degee of roll from which she can no longer recover. The Queen Mary came within a degree or two of capsizing off Newfoundland when a rogue wave burst her pilothouse windows ninety feet up; she sagged on her beam ends for an agonizing minute before regaining her trim. Two forces are locked in combat for a ship like that: the downward push of gravity and the upward lift of bouyancy. Gravity is the combined weight of the vessel and everything on it -- crew, cargo, fishing gear -- seeking the center of the earth. Bouyancy is the force of all the enclosed air in the hull trying to rise above water level.
Junger, Sebastian The Perfect Storm, 78.
High-rollers or not, the crew is still supposed to show up at the dock every morning for work. Inevitably, something has broken on the trip -- a line gets wound around the drive shaft and must be dove on, the antennas get snapped off, the radios go dead. Depending on the problem, it can take anywhere from an afternoon to several days to fix. Then the engine has to be overhauled: change the belts and filters, check the oil, fill the hydraulics, clean the injectors, clean the plugs, test the generators. Finally, there's the endless task of maintaining the deck gear. Blocks have to be greased, ropes have to be spliced, chains and cables have to be replaced, rust spots have to be ground down and painted. One ill-kept piece of gear can kill a man. Charlie Reed saw a hoisting block fall on someone and shear his arm right off; another crew member had forgotten to tighten a shackle.
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm
When a boat floods, the first thing that happens is that her electical system shorts out. The lights go off, and for a few moments the only ilumination is the frenetic blue of sparks arcing down into the water. It's said that people in extreme situations perceive thing in distorted, almost surreal ways, and when the wires start to cackle and burn, perhaps one of the crew thinks of fireworks -- of the last Fourth of July, walking around Gloucester with his girlfriend and watching colors blossom over the inner harbor. There'd be tourists shuffling down Rogers Street and fishermen hooting from bars and the smell of gunpowder and fried clams drifting through town. He'd have his whole life ahead of him, that July evening; he'd have every choice in the world.
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, p. 140.
Rock critics readily acknowledge Paul McCartney as the source of more than a cartonful of rock's greatest songs. Then why do they treat the man as if he were John Lennon's gigolo? Too rich? Still too pretty" Too long married to the woman they all told him not to get married to, and now too content to be good copy: Tsk, tsk. Such jealousy during the season of good will is not becoming. Thank goodness there were few afficionadic spoilsports to spoil our fun in the throng of fifteen thousand -- not that young and not very ethnic -- who roared their delight when McCartney walked onto the stage of Madison Square Garden recently.
What we stared at in awe was not the well-chronicled light show that spectacularly encircled, divided, splintered, pinpointed, and diamond-cut the stage, nor the explosions that highlighted the rendition of 'Live and Let Die,' but the incredibly joyful man who still looked good enough to scream at while playing and singing and clowning as if he had nothing to prove, and wanting nothing more than a good time. What we almost couldn't believe anyone heard was the lead-singing Beatle abetted by a smashing backup band gloriously reproducing many of the sweetest memories of our past.
We stopped counting standing ovations after sixteen. Not because we lost track, but because nobody would sit down. We lip-synched every 'old' song along with McCartney, sang every sing-along louder than the one before. The 'na-na's that ended 'Hey Jude" were deafening. The shouting after the first chorus of 'Got to Get you into My Life' could have drowned out an Eddie Van Halen solo. Rock critics always want performers to break new ground, and deride McCartney for staying safe in his garden. That night, all we wanted to know was if there was room there for us, too, because the place sure seemed like paradise.
The New Yorker, 1/1/90
Inside, everything's just as we left it the summer before -- floors swept, hearth clean, dishes stacked on the open shelves, a jar of dried flowers top the great twelve-sided table that dominates the room, constructed by a proto-hippie carpenter friend from the wooden back of an abandoned truck and set upon four upturned elephantine logs. The pink Victorian piano, retrieved long ago from the island dump where a church had deposited it for recycling, is closed. Shells on the windowsills, Stevie's monster drawins on the wall. All silent, familiar, undisturbed.
**** Ever since the early fifties in New York, when I first read the Brontes as I rode the subway between upper Broadway, where I lived, and my Wall Street clerical job, I've wanted to reread them. But too much else was lined up waiting; rereading was a luxury I had no time for. But now time has stepped out of its running shoes, dropped its disguises, returned to the rhythm of the tides, the cycles of the planets and the moon, the slow ripening of the plants I gather, the long leavening of the yeasty breads I bake. Poitless to try to slow or hurry it, much less to 'save' it. Slowly the kneaded dough rises in the bowl at its own pace, and after the first long rising you punch it down and let it rise again, and when it once more fills the pan, you bake it. The rich aroma of freshly baked bread permeates the cabin all day long, and each time you cut a slice, spread it with jam, chew it, you experience again the whole sensuous process: the kneading, the rising, the punching down, the baking. Gradually I realize that the very concept saving time is either a solecism (surely time goes at its own good pace) or a waste (save for what?); the more lavishly I spend time, the more I seem to have, like the wild leaves I pluck for salad which grow more lushly the more I pick. In nubble time history melts away, taking with it all traces of the number game. Old, young, obsolete -- these time-bounded words don't apply in a realm where there's time enough for everything; indeed, all the time in the world.
Alexis Kates Shulman, Drinking the Rain
Leverett had the long face and shamble of an underfed horse and he was tall enough to have to duck under shop signs. He led Blair up the station steps to a street of shops of greasy red brick. Despite the gloom of gas lamps, the sidewalk was crowded with shoppers and outdoor displays of waterproof coats. Wellington boots, silk scarves, satin ribbons, Pilkington glass, paraffin oil. Stalls offered sides of Australian beef, glutinous tripe, herring and cod arrayed in tiers, iced baskets of oysters. The smells of tea and coffee insinuated like exotic perfumes. Everything lay under a faintly glittering veil of soot. The thought occurred to Blair that if Hell had a flourishing main street it would look like this.
Eliza watched to see the wagon pass by. But it didn't pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house. The dog darted from beneath the wheels and ran ahead. The two shepherds ran out at him. All three stopped, and they circled. The caravan pulled up at Eliza's wire fence and stopped. The dog lowered his tail and retired under the wagon.
Eliza, squatting on the ground, watched to see the crazy, loose-jointed wagon pass by. But it didn't pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house, crooked old wheels skirling and squeaking. The rangy dog darted from beneath the wheels and ran ahead. Instantly the two ranch shepherds ran out at him. Then all three stopped, and, with stiff and quivering tails, with taut straight legs, with ambassadorial dignity, they slowly circled sniffing daintily. The caravan pulled up at Elisa's wire fence and stopped. Now the newcomer dog, feeling outnumbered, lowered his tail and retired under the wagon with raised hackles and bared teeth.
Dwight made a study of me. He thought about me during the day while he grunted over the engines of trucks and generators, and in the evening while he watched me eat, and late at night while he sat heavy-lidded at the kitchen table with a pint of Old Crow and a package of Camels to support him in his deliberations. He shared his findings as they came to him. The trouble with me was, I thought I was going to get through life without doing any work. The trouble with me was, I thought I was smarter than everyone else. The trouble with me was, I thought other people couldn't tell what I was thinking. The trouble with me was, I didn't think.
But first we made our rounds. As we left school we followed girls at a safe distance and offered up smart remarks. We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything that wasn't under glass. We coasted stolen tricycles down the hills around Alkai Point, standing on the seats and jumping off at the last moment to send them crashing into parked cars. Sometimes, if we had the money, we took a bus downtown and weaved through the winos around Pioneer Square to stare at guns in the windows of pawnshops. For all three of us the Luger was the weapon of choice; our passion for this pistol was profound and about the only passion we admitted to. In the presence of a Luger we stopped our continual jostling of each other and stood wide-eyed.
Tobias Wolff,This Boy's Life
Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by -- women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone -- and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.
Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
Charlie's office was just large enough to sit down in without stretching your legs. Even so, it was ordinarily as pleasant a spot to drink a soda and shoot the breeze as any I knew in Kingdom Common. On the walls hung old-fashioned prints of men with dogs and guns, photographs of Red Sox players, and topographical maps of the Kingdom quadrangle and the Canadian bush country across the border to the north, all heavily crosshatched with red, blue, and green X's and O's designating the probable lairs of big trout and big bucks. The desktop was strewn with trout flies and fly-tying paraphernalia, boxes of shotgun and rifle shells, the second-place trophy from last year's Smash-up Crash-up Derby, and more outdoor periodicals than the magazine rack in Farlow Blake's barbershop in the back of the hotel, all presided over by an eight-by-ten framed color photograph of Charlie's longtime fiancee, Judge Forrest Allen's daughter Athena, smiling archly out over my brother's cluttered bailiwick.
Howard Frank Mosher, A Stranger in the Kingdom
This is Jerome's bus. It belongs to Jerome Weinberger, whose calling card describes him as a teacher-sculptor. About Jerome: he's in his late forties, short, well built; trim beard; lives in Long Beach, out on the Island. About the bus: it's a '67 Chevy; Jerome bought it on Staten Island last year, painted it off-white, and then added blue racing stripes and white lettering on both sides. The lettering says 'Discoveries in Sculpture.' Jerome calls the bus the Mobile Sculpture Gallery. Admission is free, but you're welcome to make a contribution. According to a pamphlet (also free), Jerome and the bus have won praise from Ed Graff, principal of the Lido Elementary School, in Long Beach, and from Adria Braverman, supervisor of art at Thomas Jefferson High School, in Brooklyn, among others. Several original Weinbergers are on display inside the bus, including the llama and baby llama made out of brushes; the football placekicker made from a stapler; the samurai warriors made of vises and clamps and corkscrews; and the motorcycle-inner-tube/sardine-can/light-bulb tableau, which is an example of Jerome's more daring recent abstract work.
Mark Singer, Jerome's Bus
Every bull market has its darling. In the nineteen-twenties, it was RCA. In the nineteen-sixties, it was Xerox. And in the nineteen-nineties it was Cisco. By the beginning of last year, Cisco Systems was to the New Economy what George Washington had been to the young republic: the embodiment of its promise, the repository of its myths, and the leader on whom everything depended. ("Without Cisco, there would be no Internet," one Wall Street analyst said in 1999.) Cisco was hugely profitable, and in the nineties its stock rose eighty-nine thousand per cent. Fortune put John Chambers, Cisco's C.E.O., on its cover, asking, "Is John Chambers the best C.E.O. on earth?" We all knew the answer. Everyone, it seemed, owned the stock. Fourteen months ago, Cisco became the most valuable company on earth.
James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, May 21, 2001
At the checkout stand of a Greenwich Village grocery store, a middle-aged couple in tennis shoes, tan sorts, and blue polo shirts discussed the end of summer. The man, wearing a Mets cap, guessed that fall began on September 21st, but the woman, sporting a hat from Barney's Paint Shop, suggested that September 22nd was closer to the mark. The woman behind the register disagreed. 'It's the twenty-third,' she said. 'That's when my Uncle Elmer got home from jail. My aunt said he planned it that way so he wouldn't have to weed the yard.' Why, we wondered, hadn't these people understood that fall was already here? A lucky few, specially equipped, are able to keep autumn away until the Labor Day weekend: until Saturday evening, when the last gin-and-tonic has been drunk; until Sunday evening, when the sun has never looked so low in the sky so early in the day; until Monday morning, when 'tomorrow' sounds like a threat. But for the rest of us fall comes earlier than that. It comes with the mail: with the reminders from the window cleaner who wants to remove the screens, from the gardener who wants to lay down the fertilizer, from the roofer and the furnace repairman, from the old man who sells firewood, from the mother-and-son team who unclog the gutters before the snow. It comes with the arrival of the Philharmonic tickets ordered last March, and the tuition bill, and the questionnaire from the school nurse. (No, we didn't have diphtheria this summer). It comes at the nursery, when Mr. Von Roth asks if we'll be wanting the usual number of bulbs this year. It comes in the Sunday papers, with the advertising supplement that announces a sale on loose-leaf filler and crayons. It comes through the air on the conversations of strangers planning doctors' appointments and business trips, college-football weekends, and the Thanksgiving Day guest list. Then we realize once again that a season is only loosely tethered to the sun, and a sharp gust chills us, a blast peculiar to a day in the middle of August.
For the west is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying, 'Flee, all is discovered.' It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.
Robertson Davies, from his Deptford trilogy
There are many who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. There are others who desire to know in order that they themselves be known: that is vanity. Others seek knowledge in order to sell it: that is dishonorable. But there are also some who seek knowledge in order to edify others. That is love.'
Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century, Cistercian reformer.
...the truly reliable path to coexistence. . . must be rooted in self-transcendence. Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe. . . as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not. . . with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
Vaclev Havel, 'Declaration of Interdependence.'
'...if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. Nothing that has happened in the agricultural revolution of the last fifty years has invalidated these requirements, though everything that has happened has ignored or defied them.'
'When we adopt nature as measure, we require practice that is locally knowledgeable. The particular farm, that is, must not be treated as any farm. And the particular knowledge of particular places is beyond the competence of any centralized power or authority. Farming by the measure of nature -- which is to say, the nature of the particular place -- means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love. . . . The inability to distinguish between a farm and any farm is a condition predisposing to abuse, and abuse has been the result. Rape, indeed, has been the result, and we have seen that we are not exempt from the damage we have inflicted. '
Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes. He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas. Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.
Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River: part II
He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went away slowly, the feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the thrill that made his shoulders ache. It was all right now. His rod lying out on the logs, Nick tied a new hook on the leader, pulling the gut tight until it grimped into itself in a hard knot.
Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River: part II
Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River: part II
Until I was thirteen and left Arkansas for good, the store was my favorite place to be. Alone and empty in the mornings, it looked like an unopened present from a stranger. Opening the front doors was pulling the ribbon off the unexpected gift. The light would come in softly (we faced north), easing itself over the shelves of mackerel, salmon, tobacco, thread. It fell flat on the big vat of lard and by noontime during the summer the grease had softened to a thick soup. Whenever I walked into the store in the afternoon, I sensed that it was tired. I alone could hear the slow pulse of its job half done. But just before bedtime, after numerous people had walked in and out, had argued over their bills, or joked about their neighbors, or just dropped in 'to give Sister Henderson a 'Hi y'all,'" the promise of magic mornings returned to the store and spread itself over the family in washed life waves.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Especially in the glazed heat of the afternoons when the shadows began to slip like caps and gloves upon the trees of one bank and there was no sound but the sound of the paddles, Johnson would be arrested by the silence of the trees, by the sensation of being watched. Sometimes he might imagine the tree itself was looking at him, that its trunk and spread of branches were in some fantastic, struck-rigid way, human; or that people were concealed in it, or animals, their eyes as fine and narrow as needles. . . There was the sensation of casually remembering some incident in one's life and of writing it upon the faces of the trees, spreading one's life on them, and then on finding one's memories breathed out thickly, heavy with brooding and weighted with significance, upon oneself. The trees would hold every thought one had had an would keep them there for ever, so that looking back one would dread to return that way, here to meet this shame or that voluptuousness or hatred.
V.W. Pritchett, Dead Man Leading
The newly married pair departed for England, by sea, in a sluggishly churning vessel. A shipboard postcard arrived: on the one side a view of the ship itself, all serene white flanks pocked by portholes, and on the other an unfamiliar script. It was the new husband's. I studied his handwriting -- examined its loops and troughs, the blue turns of ink where they thickened and narrowed, the height of the 'l's and 'd's, the width of the crossbars, the hillocks of the 'm's and the 'n's, the connecting tails and the interrupting gaps. The sentences themselves were sturdy and friendly, funny and offhand -- entirely by the by. Clearly, composing this note was a lunch-table diversion. 'You do it,' I imagined the new wife telling the new husband. In a minute and a half it was done.
Cynthia Ozick, Lovesickness ( The New Yorker, 8/25/97)
I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took fish-lines and matches and other things -- everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I wanted an ax, but there wasn't any, only the one out at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was gong to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (Cf Hemingway )
The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell -- as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead. And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.
E.B.White, Charlotte's Web, p. 13.
from The New Yorker:
At the checkout stand of a Greenwich Village grocery store, a middle-aged couple in tennis shoes, tan sorts, and blue polo shirts discussed the end of summer. The man, wearing a Mets cap, guessed that fall began on September 21st, but the woman, sporting a hat from Barney's Paint Shop, suggested that September 22nd was closer to the mark. The woman behind the register disagreed. 'It's the twenty-third,' she said. 'That's when my Uncle Elmer got home from jail. My aunt said he planned it that way so he wouldn't have to weed the yard.' Why, we wondered, hadn't these people understood that fall was already here? A lucky few, specially equipped, are able to keep autumn away until the Labor Day weekend: until Saturday evening, when the last gin-and-tonic has been drunk; until Sunday evening, when the sun has never looked so low in the sky so early in the day; until Monday morning, when 'tomorrow' sounds like a threat. But for the rest of us fall comes earlier than that. It comes with the mail: with the reminders from the window cleaner who wants to remove the screens, from the gardener who wants to lay down the fertilizer, from the roofer and the furnace repairman, from the old man who sells firewood, from the mother-and-son team who unclog the gutters before the snow. It comes with the arrival of the Philharmonic tickets ordered last March, and the tuition bill, and the questionnaire from the school nurse. (No, we didn't have diphtheria this summer). It comes at the nursery, when Mr. Von Roth asks if we'll be wanting the usual number of bulbs this year. It comes in the Sunday papers, with the advertising supplement that announces a sale on loose-leaf filler and crayons. It comes through the air on the conversations of strangers planning doctors' appointments and business trips, college-football weekends, and the Thanksgiving Day guest list. Then we realize once again that a season is only loosely tethered to the sun, and a sharp gust chills us, a blast peculiar to a day in the middle of August.
Apart from teaching him Latin, Stratford grammar school taught Shakespeare nothing at all. It did not teach him mathematics or any of the natural sciences. It did not teach him history, unless a few pieces of information about ancient events strayed in through Latin quotations. It did not teach him geography, for the first (and most inadequate) textbook on geography did not appear until the end of the century, and maps and atlases were rare even in university circles. It did not teach him modern languages, for when a second language was taught at a grammar school it was invariably Greek.
The way a person speaks can tell us many things in addition to the message he is aware of communicating. Users of a flat A tell us that they were probably raised somewhere in the Middle West.This may not be so, however, since radio and television are spreading the flat A throughout the land.The adult who uses slang on every occasion is probably telling us not to consider him a "square."By his display, he might also be telling us that only too recently he was one.And the stumbling verbal gropings of the rebellious young are meant to assure us that the speakers are sincere.Presumably, only hypocrites are capable of eloquence.
I looked at Sinbad. He was just my little brother. I hated him. He never wiped his nose. He cried. He wet the bed. He got away with not eating his dinner. He had to wear specs with one black lens. He ran to get the ball. No one else did that. They all waited for it to come to them. He went through them all no bother. He was brilliant. He wasn't selfish like most fellahs who could dribble. It was weird, looking at him. It was great, and I wanted to kill him. You couldn't be proud of your little brother.
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
I'd hold my arms out straight till they ached and I'd spin. I could feel the air against my arms, trying to stop them from going so fast, like dragging them through water. I kept going. Eyes open, little steps in a circle; my heels cut into the grass, made it juicy; really fast -- the house, the kitchen, the hedge, the back, the other hedge, the apple tree, the house, the kitchen, the hedge, the back -- waiting to stop my feet. I never warned myself. It just happened -- the other hedge, the apple tree, the house, the kitchen -- stop -- onto the ground, on my back, sweating, gasping, everything still spinning. The sky -- round and round -- nearly wanting to get sick. Wet from sweating, cold and hot. Belch. I had to lie there till it was over. Round and round; it was better with my eyes open, trying to get my eyes to hang onto one thing and stop it from turning. Snot, sweat, round, round and round. I didn't know why I did it; it was terrible -- maybe that was why. It was good getting there -- spinning. Stopping was the bad bit, and after. It had to come; I couldn't spin forever. Recovering. Stuck to the ground. I could feel the world turning. Gravity sticking me down, holding me, my shoulders; my shins sore. The world was round and Ireland was stuck on the side; I knew that when I was spinning -- falling off the world. The worst was when there was nothing in the sky, nothing to grab, blue blue blue.
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
The recency of much knowledge is astonishing when one stops to consider it. Millions of men are still living who could have seen Darwin. The man who discovered that germs cause disease died in 1910. The father of antiseptic surgery lived until 1912. Pavlov was living in 1936, Freud in 1939. It was not until 1875 that the essential nature of the act of fertilization was understood, and not until the 1920's that the various hormones were isolated. Only in the past two decades has the study of animal behavior been put on a scientific basis. Our knowledge of prehistoric man is almost entirely a twentieth-century affair, and an awareness of how much that knowledge affects our knowledge of ourselves seems destined to wait until the twenty-first or later.
Behind him the white man was shouting, 'My horse! Fetch my horse!" and he thought for an instant of cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weedchoked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, strained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying 'Pap! Pap!', running again before he knew he had begun to run stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, 'Father! Father!'
William Faulkner, Barn Burning
Once ( it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts. One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes -- an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but at the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels -- the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such -- whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarised statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it ) and retailed for money and which on actual application proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trusties) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blinid fount where he had met justice and been hurled back and down): using he mails to defraud: who felt that he had been defrauded by the third-class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.
William Faulkner, Old Man
Big money in turn has brought big emotional trouble. Envy is the new worm in the apple of sport. To read about the New York Yankees as they bickered through the summer of 1977, when Reggie Jackson had arrived toting his monetary bundle, was like reading Ann Landers. The game was secondary; first we had to learn whose feelings were hurt, whose pride was wounded. In once-sedate tennis, the pot of gold is now enormous and the players are strung as tightly as their rackets. In football and basketball the pay is sky-high, and so is the umbrage.
William Zinsser, On Writing Well
Dick goes out on the leveled stream and lays down harnesses in the snow. The sled is packed, the gear lashed under skins. Everything is ready for the dogs. They are barking, roaring, screaming with impatience for the run. One by one, Donna unchains them. Out of the trees they dash toward the sled. Chipper goes first and, standing in front, holds all the harnesses in a good taut line. Abie, Little Girl, Grandma, Ug -- the others fast fill in. They jump in their traces, can't wait to go. If they jump too much, they get cuffed. Wait another minute and they'll have everything so twisted we'll be here another hour. Go! The whole team hits at once. The sled, which was at rest a moment before, is moving fast. Destination, Eagle; time, two days.
John McPhee, "Coming into the Country"
We take a clearer look at the stream. If ever there was moose country, it is Umbazooksus Stream -- with its broad meanders through fields of sedge, its occasional dead standing trees. The stream is quiet and protected, surrounded by forest. We decide that we are going to see a moose here. We will stop paddling, stop talking, and stay until a moose shows up or the stream freezes. We settle down to wait. Stillness envelops us. It is the stillness of a moose intending to appear.
John McPhee, "Survival of the Bark Canoe"
In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines.
Gibbon, "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
Rock critics readily acknowledge Paul McCartney as the source of more than a cartonful of rock's greatest songs. Then why do they treat the man as if he were John Lennon's gigolo? Too rich? Still too pretty" Too long married to the woman they all told him not to get married to, and now to content to be good copy: Tsk, tsk. Such jealousy during the season of good will is not becoming. Thank goodness there were few afficionadic spoilsports to spoil our fun in the throng of fifteen thousand -- not that young and not very ethnic -- who roared their delight when McCartney walked onto the stage of Madison Square Garden recently.
What we stared at in awe was not the well-chronicled light show that spectacularly encircled, divided, splintered, pinpointed, and diamond-cut the stage, nor the explosions that highlighted the rendition of 'Live and Let Die,' but the incredibly joyful man who still looked good enough to scream at while playing and singing and clowning as if he had nothing to prove, and wanting nothing more than a good time. What we almost couldn't believe anyone heard was the lead-singing Beatle abetted by a smashing backup band gloriously reproducing many of the sweetest memories of our past.
We stopped counting standing ovations after sixteen. Not because we lost track, but because nobody would sit down. We lip-synched every 'old' song along with McCartney, sang every sing-along louder than the one before. The 'na-na's that ended 'Hey Jude" were deafening. The shouting after the first chorus of 'Got to Get you into My Life' could have drowned out an Eddie Van Halen solo. Rock critics always want performers to break new ground, and deride McCartney for staying safe in his garden. That night, all we wanted to know was if there was room there for us, too, because the place sure seemed like paradise.
The New Yorker, 1/1/90
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces ,
Inside, everything's just as we left it the summer before -- floors swept, hearth clean, dishes stacked on the open shelves, a jar of dried flowers top the great twelve-sided table that dominates the room, constructed by a proto-hippie carpenter friend from the wooden back of an abandoned truck and set upon four upturned elephantine logs. The pink Victorian piano, retrieved long ago from the island dump where a church had deposited it for recycling, is closed. Shells on the windowsills, Stevie's monster drawins on the wall. All silent, familiar, undisturbed.
Ever since the early fifties in New York, when I first read the Brontes as I rode the subway between upper Broadway, where I lived, and my Wall Street clerical job, I've wanted to reread them. But too much else was lined up waiting; rereading was a luxury I had no time for. But now time has stepped out of its running shoes, dropped its disguises, returned to the rhythm of the tides, the cycles of the planets and the moon, the slow ripening of the plants I gather, the long leavening of the yeasty breads I bake. Poitless to try to slow or hurry it, much less to 'save' it. Slowly the kneaded dough rises in the bowl at its own pace, and after the first long rising you punch it down and let it rise again, and when it once more fills the pan, you bake it. The rich aroma of freshly baked bread permeates the cabin all day long, and each time you cut a slice, spread it with jam, chew it, you experience again the whole sensuous process: the kneading, the rising, the punching down, the baking. Gradually I realize that the very concept saving time is either a solecism (surely time goes at its own good pace) or a waste (save for what?); the more lavishly I spend time, the more I seem to have, like the wild leaves I pluck for salad which grow more lushly the more I pick. In nubble time history melts away, taking with it all traces of the number game. Old, young, obsolete -- these time-bounded words don't apply in a realm where there's time enough for everything; indeed, all the time in the world.
Alexis Kates Shulman, Drinking the Rain
Leverett had the long face and shamble of an underfed horse and he was tall enough to have to duck under shop signs. He led Blair up the station steps to a street of shops of greasy red brick. Despite the gloom of gas lamps, the sidewalk was crowded with shoppers and outdoor displays of waterproof coats. Wellington boots, silk scarves, satin ribbons, Pilkington glass, paraffin oil. Stalls offered sides of Australian beef, glutinous tripe, herring and cod arrayed in tiers, iced baskets of oysters. The smells of tea and coffee insinuated like exotic perfumes. Everything lay under a faintly glittering veil of soot. The thought occurred to Blair that if Hell had a flourishing main street it would look like this.
Elisa watched to see the wagon pass by. But it didn't pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house. The dog darted from beneath the wheels and ran ahead. The two shepherds ran out at him. All three stopped, and they circled. The caravan pulled up at Elisa's wire fence and stopped. The dog lowered his tail and retired under the wagon.
Elisa, squatting on the ground, watched to see the crazy, loose-jointed wagon pass by. But it didn't pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house, crooked old wheels skirling and squeaking. The rangy dog darted from beneath the wheels and ran ahead. Instantly the two ranch shepherds ran out at him. Then all three stopped, and, with stiff and quivering tails, with taut straight legs, with ambassadorial dignity, they slowly circled sniffing daintily. The caravan pulled up at Elisa's wire fence and stopped. Now the newcomer dog, feeling outnumbered, lowered his tail and retired under the wagon with raised hackles and bared teeth.
The single hunter's requirement that the guide's boat of the 1850's did not satisfy was that of silence. Its lapstrake planking produced a characteristic chuckling even as it slid through calm water, and the noise was accentuated by the smallest ripple on the surface. While today many of us consider this noise charming, those engaged in jacking deer did not. But how to eliminate this defect? Smooth carvel planking was out of the question, for planking so thin would never stand caulking; some form of batten-seam construction would provide the smooth outer skin but at the expense of pounds of unwanted weight. Backwoods innovation provided the solution, in a refinement of the dory-lap, a technique used in planking dories where each edge of each plank is beveled. In a dory, a shoulder is left on each plank. The planks are thus not fitted flush; rather, some of the plank edge is left proud, except at the gains at the bow and stern, where the plank bevels gradually feather, allowing the planks to become flush. The Adirondack builders modified this technique by cutting a bevel, running out to a feather edge, for the entire length of each plank; when mated, these bevels resulted in a smoooth, virtually undetectable seam. Cutting such a bevel accurately enough for watertightness on such thin planking was a considerable challenge; added to this was the fact that now that the planking lay flush against the frames, the builder was required to hollow the inner face and round the outer face of each plank, just as required in carvel construction. The thinness of the plank and the accuracy of the bevel meant that there was precious little room for fairing up the outside after planking was completed -- the plank must be shaped, except for the final sanding, on the bench before hanging.
Robert W. Stephens, The Evolution of the Adirondack Guideboat , Wooden Boat, 5/6 1996
Every year my muscles ache from that first workday of spring. I end by planting myself on the steps of our farmhouse porch. I lean against the rails, kick off my boots, and feel the heat rise from my sore feet. My shirt sticks to my back from the first good sweat of the year. Closing my eyes, I reall a story about work, like the hard work of this first day of spring.
David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach
After reading about Jackknife Ben, I often wondered about possible connections between father and son. Could it be that Mr. Shawn's deep aversion to blood and gore (he could scarcely bear to hear about a surgical operation), his bundling up against the cold, his staying close to his home and office, his hatred of any kind of commercialism, and his quietness were all, in one way or another, negative reactions to his father's life? I couldn't think of anyone less likely to carry a pocketknife than he; instead, he always had on him a silver mechanical pencil. And I wondered if his almost total reliance on verbal agreements, his taking huge risks with writers and artists, his editing an article or looking at a drawing as if it were a piece of filigreed jewelry, his interest in people, his contentment with minimal comforts, and his total lack of self-importance were positive consequences of his father's early peripatetic life and later stockyard ethics. Such comparisons between the two men might be farfetched, but were they any more so than those between the lives of fathers and sons generally? Then again, such facts were no more relevant to explaining him than were the facts of a poet's life to explaining his poetry.
Ved Mehta on William Shawn in Atlantic Monthly , April '98.
Charlie's office was just large enough to sit down in without stretching your legs. Even so, it was ordinarily as pleasant a spot to drink a soda and shoot the breeze as any I knew in Kingdom Common. On the walls hung old-fashioned prints of men with dogs and guns, photographs of Red Sox players, and topographical maps of the Kingdom quadrangle and the Canadian bush country across the border to the north, all heavily crosshatched with red, blue, and green X's and O's designating the probable lairs of big trout and big bucks. The desktop was strewn with trout flies and fly-tying paraphernalia, boxes of shotgun and rifle shells, the second-place trophy from last year's Smash-up Crash-up Derby, and more outdoor periodicals than the magazine rack in Farlow Blake's barbershop in the back of the hotel, all presided over by an eight-by-ten framed color photograph of Charlie's longtime fiancee, Judge Forrest Allen's daughter Athena, smiling archly out over my brother's cluttered bailiwick.
Howard Frank Mosher, A Stranger in the Kingdom
Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.
Robertson Davies, from his Deptford trilogy
There are many who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. There are others who desire to know in order that they themselves be known: that is vanity. Others seek knowledge in order to sell it: that is dishonorable. But there are also some who seek knowledge in order to edify others. That is love.'
Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century, Cistercian reformer.
...the truly reliable path to coexistence. . . must be rooted in self-transcendence. Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe. . . as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not. . . with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
Vaclev Havel, 'Declaration of Interdependence.'
'...if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. Nothing that has happened in the agricultural revolution of the last fifty years has invalidated these requirements, though everything that has happened has ignored or defied them.'
'When we adopt nature as measure, we require practice that is locally knowledgeable. The particular farm, that is, must not be treated as any farm. And the particular knowledge of particular places is beyond the competence of any centralized power or authority. Farming by the measure of nature -- which is to say, the nature of the particular place -- means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love. . . . The inability to distinguish between a farm and any farm is a condition predisposing to abuse, and abuse has been the result. Rape, indeed, has been the result, and we have seen that we are not exempt from the damage we have inflicted. '
Until I was thirteen and left Arkansas for good, the store was my favorite place to be. Along and empty in t he mornings, it looked like an unopened present from a stranger. Opening the front doors was pulling the ribbon off the unexpected gift. The light would come in softly (we faced north), easing itself over the shelves of mackerel, salmon, tobacco, thread. It fell flat on the big vat of lard and by noontime during the summer the grease had softened to a thick soup. Whenever I walked into the store in the afternoon, I sensed that it was tired. I alone could hear the slow pulse of its job half done. But just before bedtime, after numerous people had walked in and out, had argued over their bills, or joked about their neighbors, or just dropped in 'to give Sister Henderson a 'Hi y'all,'" the promise of magic mornings returned to the store and spread itself over the family in washed life waves.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Especially in the glazed heat of the afternoons when the shadows began to slip like caps and gloves upon the trees of one bank and there was no sound but the sound of the paddles, Johnson would be arrested by the silence of the trees, by the sensation of being watched. Sometimes he might imagine the tree itself was looking at him, that its trunk and spread of branches were in some fantastic, struck-rigid way, human; or that people were concealed in it, or animals, their eyes as fine and narrow as needles. . . There was the sensation of casually remembering some incident in one's life and of writing it upon the faces of the trees, spreading one's life on them, and then on finding one's memories breathed out thickly, heavy with brooding and weighted with significance, upon oneself. The trees would hold every thought one had had an would keep them there for ever, so that looking back one would dread to return that way, here to meet this shame or that voluptuousness or hatred.
V.W. Pritchett, Dead Man Leading
Because I live in Tribeca, I end up walking around in SoHo two or three times a week. I usually have a destination in mind -- to shop for food at the Gourmet Garage, or to look at the clothes at Helmut Lang or Agnes B., or to see a show at some gallery, though I don't do much of that anymore. I'm almost always looking to buy something. And there's a lot to buy in SoHo: it is a village of fancy sunglasses and 'authentic' Indonesian furniture, edible flowers, high-design soap dishes and fifty-dollar Kliss Touch scissors, twenty-one-year-old Balsamic vinegar, plastics, fashion, and cell phones cell phones cell phones. One walks in and out of shoe shops, jewely stores, and art galleries, and the shoes, the jewelry, and the art don't seem any different from one another as objects. This is Nobrow -- the space between the familiar categories of high and low culture. In Nobrow, paintings by van Gogh and Monet are the headliners at the Bellagio Hotel while the Cirque du Soleil borrows freely from performance art in creating the Las Vegas spectacle inside. In Nobrow, artists show at K mart, museums are filled with TV screens, and the soundtrack of 'Titanic' is not only a best-selling classical album but one that supports the dying classical enterprises of old-style highbrow musicians.
Seabrook, John "Nobrow Culture", The New Yorker, September20, 1999.
I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took fish-lines and matches and other things -- everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I wanted an ax, but there wasn't any, only the one out at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was gong to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (Cf Hemingway )
Victoria Gallegos, at twenty-seven, is the highest-selling salesperson in Prada's Madison Avenue store -- and, by extension, in the company. Though her specialty is menswear, she sells everything: belts, handbags, shoes, suitcases, briefcases, key cases, golf bags, women's clothing, appointment books, and underwear. Last year, her first at the store, she sold around two million dollars' worth of merchandise. Combining old-fashioned sales psychology with new technologies, Victoria moves the merchandise in ways that seem magical even to the people who hired her.
Mimi Swartz, 'Victoria's Secret', The New Yorker, March 1998.
A room of one's own : Is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape? What they propose, to anyone who admits them into the space of a daydream, is a place of solitude a few steps off the beaten track of everyday life. Beyond that, though, the form the dream takes seems to vary with the dreamer. Generally the imagined room has a fixed terrestrial address, whether located deep within the family house or out in the woods under its own roof. For some people, though, the same dream can just as easily assume a vehicular form. I'm thinking of the one-person cockpit or cabin, a mobile room in which to journey some distance from the shore of one's usual cares. Fixed or mobile, a dream of escape is what this probably sounds like. But it's more like a wish for a slightly different angle on things -- for the view from the tower, or tree line, or the bobbing point a couple hundred yards off the coast. It might be a view of the same old life, but from out here it will look different, the outlines of the self a little more distinct.
Michael Pollan, A Place of One's Own
Jim's shop consisted of two large rooms divided by wooden racks stacked with handsome slabs of unfinished oak, cherry, mahogany, maple, and pine. Both spaces were crowded with doors, windows, cabinets, and countertops arrested in various stages of fabrication, and the whole place looked as though a blizzard had recently passed through, coating everything in several inches of fresh, fragrant sawdust, Jim included. The back room held two large, low tables where Jim did his layouts and glue-ups. Up front were a half-dozen machine tools spread out around the room in a rough approximation of an assembly line, separate stations each for the planer, shaper, table saw, tenoner, mortiser, and drill punch. It seemed like an awful lot of machinery for a woodworker as devoted to tradition as Jim professed to be.
Michael Pollan, 'A Place of My Own,' 240.
Berkshire Wood Products consists of a small collection of ramshackle barns and sheds at the end of a long dirt road in the woods just over the state line in Massachusetts. The place had a distinct old-hippie air about it, with a big vegetable garden out front that was mulched with composted sawdust. Though only a tiny operation, the mill performed every step of the lumber-making process itself, cutting down the tree, milling the logs, kiln-drying the lumber, and dressing the planks to order.
The yardman invited me to select the boards I wanted, pointing to the very top of a three-story-tall rack that filled a large barn. To get to the ash I had to climb a scaffold, moving past handsome rough-sawn slabs of walnut, cherry, white pine, tulip wood, red oak, and yellow birch -- most of the important furniture woods of the Northeastern forest. Many of the boards still had their bark, making them look more like tree slices than lumber. I reached the stack of ash and it was gorgeous stuff: eight-foot lengths of creamy white lumber, a handful of the boards set off with elliptical galaxies of nut-brown heartwood stretching out along the grain. Evidently brown heartwood is considered undesirable in ash, because when I expressed particular interest in these boards, the foreman offered to give me a discount.
Michael Pollan, 'A Place of My Own,' 283-4.
For the west is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying, 'Flee, all is discovered.' It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
Our age is the age of power. Incredible power. World power. Media power. Technological power. Money power. Power that can alter things so quickly , a shift has occurred before most of the world's population knows anything about it. Power to lift up and throw down like a great tornado. And if you are a young executive who wants power, well, you're going to have to fight for it every bit as fiercely as Shakespeare's medieval knights hacking each other down in battle. But you are going to need more than courage and brute strength. You are going to need self-knowledge, know your strengths and weaknesses, have stamina and intelligence, know when to speak out, when to keep quiet, know how to inspire, how to apologize, when to act alone, when to support someone else, when to seize leadership, how to learn from mistakes, how to keep focused when everone else around you is screaming, and how to balance personal life and professional life -- and, above all, how to retain passion, compassion, and commitment in the face of unending complications and seemingly insuperable barriers.
Thomas Whitney and Tina Packer, Power Plays, 24.
Dwight made a study of me. He thought about me during the day while he grunted over the engines of trucks and generators, and in the evening while he watched me eat, and late at night while he sat heavy-lidded at the kitchen table with a pint of Old Crow and a package of Camels to support him in his deliberations. He shared his findings as they came to him. The trouble with me was, I thought I was going to get through life without doing any work. The trouble with me was, I thought I was smarter than everyone else. The trouble with me was, I thought other people couldn't tell what I was thinking. The trouble with me was, I didn't think.
But first we made our rounds. As we left school we followed girls at a safe distance and offered up smart remarks. We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything that wasn't under glass. We coasted stolen tricycles down the hills around Alkai Point, standing on the seats and jumping off at the last moment to send them crashing into parked cars. Sometimes, if we had the money, we took a bus downtown and weaved through the winos around Pioneer Square to stare at guns in the windows of pawnshops. For all three of us the Luger was the weapon of choice; our passion for this pistol was profound and about the only passion we admitted to. In the presence of a Luger we stopped our continual jostling of each other and stood wide-eyed.
Tobias Wolff,This Boy's Life
Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by -- women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone -- and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.
Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
Big money in turn has brought big emotional trouble. Envy is the new worm in the apple of sport. To read about the New York Yankees as they bickered through the summer of 1977, when Reggie Jackson had arrived toting his monetary bundle, was like reading Ann Landers. The game was secondary; first we had to learn whose feelings were hurt, whose pride was wounded. In once-sedate tennis, the pot of gold is now enormous and the players are strung as tightly as their rackets. In football and basketball the pay is sky-high, and so is the umbrage.