“You May Quote Me”

No peepers peeping yet on Tuesday....

The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faultering step, and slow; but this lingering pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring. In the one case you are about to part with a friend, who is becoming more gentle and agreeable at every step, and such steps can hardly be made too slowly; but in the other you have been shut up with black frost and biting blasts, and where your best consolation was being smoke-dried.

 

-      Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

 

Ah, spring, you are such a tease!

The sun shone in Leelanau on Easter! All day long! We couldn’t call it a warm day, but it was lovely. Even though the daffodils hadn’t opened yet, the little blue squills were cheery in the sunlight.

Monday was a day of rain. Shrug! “April showers”— you know the rest. On that rainy day I drove south of Traverse City on an errand that had been postponed long enough but on the way stopped at a thrift shop to look through music CDs for something to combat the dreariness of the day and give me voices in the car that were not battering me with current events. What I found was the original cast recording of “The Phantom of the Opera.” It more than fulfilled my requirements: I was in another world all afternoon! The mood of the rain … memories along every mile of road … images of the Paris Opera … the lyrics and the music!!! “Wishing I could hear your voice again….” Oh, yes! And, of course, "The Music of the Night"! I was ecstatic and miserable and floating on air and drowned in sorrow. When I got home, I told Sunny, “I’ve been breaking my heart in Paris. It will take me a while to come back to you.”

From the previous century's bulbs 

Tuesday the sun returned, and the “wild” daffodils at my place began to open (the ones that I planted not quite ready but getting close), and with another day of sun in the forecast, I hung towels out on the line. Sunny and I played in the yard, I worked at outdoor tasks, and we made it to the dog park and met with friends there. 

No more snow!!! Airborne puppy!

Mrs. Trollope said it first.

The passage quoted at the beginning of today’s post is the first paragraph of Chapter XIV in Mrs. Trollope’s book (I call her “Mrs. Trollope” because that’s how she was referred to at the time her book made such a sensation), and I used it today because it captures so well the feelings of most of my fellow northern Michigan residents. But naturally, most of the book is given over to subjects other than climate and weather. It was after reading both the Rev. Isaac Fidler’s and James Stuart, Esquire’s accounts of visiting the young United States, comparing them, and musing over the difference in the two gentlemen’s impressions, that I decided the time had come for me to read the famous account, read by both Fidler and Stuart, of American life written by Englishwoman Frances Trollope, whose visit began in the last days of 1828 and extended into 1832. 

 

Look again at those dates above. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont made their nine-month visit to “America” (i.e., the United States of) in 1831-32, so their time here would have overlapped with that of Mrs. Trollope, but I can find no evidence that the three ever met. The latter expressly says in the preface to her book (speaking of herself in the first person in the preface but in the first person in the main text):

 

She leaves to abler pens the more ambitious task of commenting on the democratic form of the American government; while, by describing, faithfully, the daily aspect of ordinary life, she has endeavored to shew how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many.

 

In other words, she isn’t going to get into politics, but it’s obvious to her, after over three years in the U.S. that England, with its monarch and aristocracy and established national Church, has the better form of government for all concerned. That, of course, is her opinion. Her observations and the conversations she committed to paper as quickly as possible so as not to lose either the words or the tone—those cannot be as easily dismissed as her opinions, if one does not share or appreciate them. 

 

Fidler and Stuart, men, along with Monsieur de Tocqueville, focusing on politics, had little to say of the life of American women, and Fanny Trollope gives detailed observations on that topic. 

 

In general, she sees the two sexes mixing very rarely. In public gatherings (mostly religious but occasionally a lecture), the norm is for men and women to sit separately. Men do their drinking at night, away from home, in places where women are not welcome (probably not allowed), and even in the home, the midday dinner meal lasts only about ten minutes, with husband and wife separating as soon as they leave the table, while at breakfast the husband reads his newspaper until he leaves for his office or shop. Boarding house meals are similarly silent and rushed.

 

As dancing and theatre-going are mostly out of bounds for 1830s Americans, young people meet at preachings or are introduced in the homes of friends. “Refined” young American ladies in this time period would never dream of allowing so much as an elbow to come into contact with any part of the body of a man or boy at a dinner table or on a staircase! When Fanny proposed a “pic-nic,” she was advised by a very proper young lady that it would be very improper for men and women to sit together on the ground. In cities, there are occasional balls. When refreshments are offered, men and women go to separate rooms. (How, though, I wonder, did they dance without touching?)

 

Mrs. Trollope gives it as her opinion that American manners would be much improved if there were more mixing of ladies and gentlemen. For one thing, she suspects the men would do much less chewing of tobacco and spitting on the floor, which was one of her constant complaints. This spitting occurred even in the House of Representatives, although the Senate, she allowed, was more dignified: its members sat up straight, rather than lounging and putting up their feet, and there was very little spitting. From the gallery, she was unable to hear much of the discussion on the floor.

 

Everywhere in the country, however, she found conversation among men almost exclusively political, while the women, in their limited sphere, gossiped among themselves and spoke of dress. Mrs. Trollope was frequently bored to tears and wondered how the women could stand the tedium of their lives. She hoped to find literary conversation in her American travels, but this hope was dashed again and again. Americans of the merchant class were not conversant even with Shakespeare and could hardly imagine they were missing anything. Their ambition was all financial, getting ahead the focus and aim of their lives.

 

Despite fierce denials met with in the United States, and despite James Stuart’s suspicion that Mrs. Trollope exaggerated or invented much of what she reported, I found her observations quite believable and calmly expressed. As to the narrow American focus on getting ahead financially, this is confirmed in de Tocqueville’s writings. Mrs. Trollope finds confirmation of her impression given by an Englishman she met.

I heard an Englishman … declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffeehouse, or at home, he had never heard Americans conversing [this would be American men] without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest.

I have read elsewhere (perhaps in Dickens?) about the constant spitting of chewing tobacco and the haste with which Americans rapidly gulped down meals in silence. Could Mrs. Trollope return today, she would find Americans enjoying more leisurely meals but snacking and sipping and gulping throughout the day, too. She would find conversation of men and women to include lively discussion of professional sports, books, films, and more, along with politics and financial matters. 

 

Our own pictures of American life in that period, whether in the North or the South, in cities or plantations or on the frontier, is generally oversimplified to the point of falsehood. Seeing our country not through history textbooks or hagiographies of famous men but through the eyes of visitors from overseas, making contemporary observations firsthand, makes for eye-opening reading. And if those observers sometimes disagree on specifics, don’t we do the same now, in the present? It’s a reason not to read only one account and think you have gotten a complete picture.

 

***

 

Well! After writing the paragraph above, I picked up the book again to continue my reading, and what did I come upon?

 

While reading and transcribing my notes, I underwent a strict self-examination. I passed in review all I had seen, all I had felt, and scrupulously challenged every expression of disapprobation; the result was, that I omitted in transcription much that I had written, as containing unnecessary details of things which had displeased me; yet, as I did so, I felt strongly that there was no exaggeration in them; but such details, though true, might be ill-natured, and I retained no more than were necessary to convey the general impressions I received.

 

Further along, near the end of her book, she devotes an entire chapter to the American reception of another English visitor’s writings following his visit to the U.S. Travels in North America, by Captain Basil Hall, was met with exactly the kind of angry denial that was to greet Mrs. Trollope’s own work, although when she finally procured her own copy of his Travels, she found that this visitor of goodwill ”earnestly sought out things to admire and commend” in America.

When he praises, it is with evident pleasure, and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint….

Both Captain Hall and Mrs. Trollope (and the captain had traveled all over the world) found it more difficult to be understood by Americans than by men and women of any other nation, which Mrs. T imputed to the exceedingly thin skin of Americans, who wanted to hear nothing but praise. I do think we have improved in this regard since the 1830s and realize that our way of life is not perfect.

The subject was metaphor, the teacher said.

 

Here is one of those silly, unimportant little issues that turn me unreasonably peevish. I was reading a book review online, and the writer of the review, a teacher of writing, praised the book author’s use of metaphor, proceeding to give half a dozen examples—all of which were similes, not metaphors! This would probably not matter to me at all, except that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on theories of metaphor, and metaphor is a puzzle for those who wrestle with literal meaning. Simile is no problem. Something is like something else. Fill in ‘something’ and ‘something’ with two different things, and you’ve got a simile. A metaphor, on the other hand, says that the first something is the second something. 

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.” Fine.

 

“Juliet is the sun.” A different kettle of fish!

 

Simile, I’m thinking, is a pretty easy case to make, because, at least for a philosopher, any two things are alike in some way or other, however remote. Persuading someone of identity, merely by stating it, requires a skillful writer and a reader who trusts that writer. 

 

At least, so seems to me. Your thoughts?

Blue sky over blue water

REMINDER --

Once There Came Two Englishmen

First, The Lo-o-o-ong Birthday!

 

Before beginning with the Englishmen, I want to note that the birthday I was so reluctant to welcome stretched out to about two weeks, from the first early package in the mail to the last birthday dinner, at which my hostess provided me with my very first experience of the famous Sanders Bumpy Cake from Detroit! I had heard of it but had never seen, let alone tasted, one before. What a treat!

The beautiful cyclamen above, my favorite hothouse plant of early spring, had better be my last birthday gift this year, but could anything be lovelier?

 

And Now, Two Englishmen in Pre-Civil War America

 

Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners, and Emigration, in the United States and Canada, Made During a Residence There in 1832, by the Rev. Isaac Fidler (NY: J. & J. Harper, 1833)

 

Three Years in North America, Vol. II (from the second London edition), by James Stuart, Esq. (NY: J. & Harper, 1833)

 

Arriving in New York in December of 1831, after seven weeks at sea, Rev. Isaac Fidler reports that he found lodging for himself, his wife, two children, and a servant lodgings in a boarding house for $21 a week, water and three meals a day included. They subsequently moved into an unfurnished apartment, dismayed at the cost (more than a furnished flat at home, the author tells us), as an entire house, which would have been their preference, was far beyond their means, even after the servant left them for better wages with an American family.

Like so many others, Rev. Fidler’s reasons came to America with the hope of improving his situation in life. 

 

Educated for the church, but destitute of interest or patronage, I remained a mere teacher at home, with little to encourage my ambition….

 

He had hopes of finding employment in an Episcopal church in the United States. When disappointed here, as he had been in England, Fidler tried his luck in Canada, but Mrs. Fidler did not care for that country, and so back to England the family went, having spent altogether less than a year in North America.

 

James Stuart, on the other hand, as indicated in his book’s title, was here for three years, his travels were much more extensive, and, as a man of apparently independent means, he was at leisure to look more carefully into the regions through which he traveled. (Stuart, actually a Scot, was married but childless; if his wife accompanied him to America, she makes no appearance in his book.) Despite a background in law, Stuart had been embroiled in more than one controversy in England that led to duels. He seems, however, to have passed his visit to our shores peaceably. 

Both Fidler and Stuart note American shrewdness and fixation with finances. Both also read Mrs. Trollope’s popular book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, before undertaking their stateside visits. Fidler, who also read Stuart’s book before publishing his own, was convinced of the absolute truth of Mrs. Trollope’s negative stories and hoped Americans would take her lessons to heart and improve themselves. Americans, for their part, denied the Trollope stories, and some American booksellers refused to carry her book—which only persuaded Fidler that the stories must be true, “as they always denounce as false whatever truth offends them.” (Thus claims of either “Guilty” and “Not Guilty” indicate guilt, as Fidler sees it here. Interesting.)

 

Stuart’s opinion, happily, was otherwise. He spent much longer in North America, traveled to every part of the country, and spoke with Americans from all walks of life, while Fidler concentrated on those who had been born in England and had emigrated as adults. Stuart also visited every denomination of church and attended at least one camp meeting (it was apparently a single camp meeting that Mrs. Trollope had painted in lurid terms), and he saw no such excesses of lewd behavior as she had reported. 

 

(Frances Milton Trollope was the mother of the English novelist, Anthony Trollope. When the latter traveled to the States himself—the northern states, at least, during the Civil War—he was grateful to be received hospitably, given his mother’s harsh published views.)

 

Stuart reported favorably on American cuisine (e.g., judging American canvasback duck as tasty as Scotch grouse) and gave fascinating details of the period’s modes of travel.

 

…The river was hard frozen, and we expected to cross on the ice; but the passage of the mails on the ice is, it seems, prohibited by the rules of the post-office of this country; and persons are employed to keep an open course for the small rowing boats, in which the mails are transported. We embarked and were pushed forward by three men, who propelled the boat by long poles shod with iron….

 

Fidler’s American travels seem to have been restricted to New York (city and state), New Jersey, and Boston, Massachusetts. He noted that Americans were “prejudiced” against British aristocracy, and he considered most American writing to “exhibit a curious medley of prejudice, ignorance, and bombast.” All of North America, in fact, struck him as crude and unrefined.

 

Fidler, not having traveled in the South, did not give an opinion on slavery but did note:

 

In New-York no white person will sit down to eat at the same table with a coloured person, nor associate in same company. … I talked with several coloured people [in Canada], and always found them, in conversation, rational and sensible.

 

He spoke apparently at length with one “coloured” woman while briefly attached to a church in Canada.

 

I encouraged her to join our Sunday school, which she did a few times; but had not acquired ability to read, before she left the neighborhood. Her husband had been a slave in the States, and had made a premature [sic] liberation of himself by crossing the boundary line. Yet he could not gain a living by his skill and labor. He was a helpless and dependent creature. I perceived the necessity of conveying useful instruction to people inured to slavery, before emancipation and the rights of freedom are bestowed. Liberty to the captive is assuredly no blessing, where this had not been previously provided. 

 

(Liberty no blessing? That, of course, was the English clergyman’s view, not an opinion given by the formerly enslaved man, whose “premature liberation” of himself would seem to indicate that he preferred freedom, despite its difficulties.) 

 

Fidler spent much more of his North American time in Canada than in the U.S. As a Church of England clergyman, he found Canada’s Anglican religious observances congenial and would have been happy to settle there permanently, had his wife been so inclined. As for religion in America, he considered Methodist to be “bigots” and expected that in time the Episcopal church would become the national church of the United States, but he had not attended the meeting of Congress that Stuart did, or he might not have made such a prediction. [See my discussion in this post, under the section “Reading the Past,” for that background.]

 

Stuart traveled extensively in the antebellum South, as well as west to St. Louis, and thus had more to say about America’s “peculiar institution” (slavery) than Fidler. In Charleston, for example, he noted his landlady 

 

… give a young man, a servant, such a blow behind the ear as made him reel, and I afterward found that it was her daily and hourly practice to beat her servants, male and female, either with her fist, or with a thong made of cowhide.

 

He quotes another writer telling a story a serving girl in the same landlady’s establishment, punished by “twenty-six lashes inflicted … with a cow-hide” while another “young negro slave who waited in the house” had to stand by and count the lashes. Nor was this the end of the girl’s punishment, as the Frenchman she had defended herself against complained to the police, had her arrested, and she was then whipped again “in his presence.”

 

“I regret that I did not take a note of this miscreant’s name, in order that I might give his disgraceful conduct its merited publicity.”

 

Note that the unnamed “miscreant,” quite rightly, is the Frenchman, not the punished serving girl.

 

Both men frequently note prices, Stuart going far beyond Fidler in that regard, paying attention to commodity markets and the resources of different regions, as well as personal finances. At one point he makes the acquaintance of a fellow Scot in Illinois, who had first settled in New York but then been tempted further west by newspaper stories describing prairie land in Illinois.

 

He therefore came directly here from New-York, and procured 500 acres of the very best land in the state, as he thinks, of rich soil from three to four feet deep. It produces from thirty to forty-five bushels of wheat, and excellent corn and oats in rotation. It would do it injury to give it manure. The land is so easily ploughed, that a two-horse plough ploughs two and a half acres per day. There is never any want of a market. Everything is bought by the merchants for New-Orleans, or for Galena, where a vast number of workmen are congregated, who are employed in the lead mines on the north-western parts of the state. There is also a considerable demand for cattle for new settlers. Cattle are allowed to run out on the prairie during the whole winter….

 

Returning to the parson: Except for his lack of satisfaction and gratitude, Fidler’s style of writing reminds me of Mr. Collins (a fictional reverend) in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as he exhibits the same overly conscious sense of social hierarchy as did the clergyman in the novel and similarly preens himself on his own judgment. Noting in his book’s preface that he has done all he could to avoid repeating anything Mrs. Trollope “had already said in a very popular and attractive style” and anything in Mr. Stuart’s book (the style and content of which he passed over in silence), Fidler writes of his own authorship in the third person: 

 

He flatters himself, therefore … that those who have read the above works may yet peruse his with some advantage.

 

Oh, yes, the advantageous perusal! 

 

Ah, but now, my own confession! It is impossible for me to read Fidler objectively, since the 19^th-century reader who once possessed the copy now mine added extensive marginalia, in soft pencil, from beginning to end of the narrative. At one point early on, that reader noted “True” in the margin, but more often, as he got deeper into the book, he was writing the word “Lie” “You lie!” or even, once, “Big Lie.” 

Here the long-ago reader remarked to the author, "You old Sponge."

I found the entertainment value increasing with longer marginal notions. Here are a few samples:

 

      “Old sour Crout”

      “Fiddler Diddaler”

      “Charitable Parson Fiddler”

      “Fiddle it off, Parson”

      “You lie, Parson”

      “Quarrelling Parson Fiddler”

      “Fidgetty Old Mrs. Fiddler” [She was never satisfied, according to her husband.]

      “Oh you old humbug”

 

The anonymous reader with his pencil even takes leave of the author on the last page of the book with “the hopes of the Reader that you will never return here” and makes reference to the writer’s “amiable spouse” and the writer’s own “amiable, candid disposition” with obvious sarcasm. I must say, it was fun sharing my reading with Anonymous from almost 200 years ago! Fidler alone would have been far too solemn!

Back to the Present?

 

One reason I have shared these two books today, other than having made extensive notes on them months ago, is to avoid discussion of current events. My head is not in the sand, never fear (though as often as possible I put my mind “somewhere else” at bedtime), but on Sundays now I am staying resolutely offline and away from the news, taking the day to restore my spirit. And although planting anything outdoors this early would be premature—no wild leeks poking up in the woods yet, no peepers peeping in the ponds—it feels good to rake the yard and to spend time at the dog park with Sunny and her friends. Small beginnings of the young season, too, are to be found, for those with searching eyes. Whatever transpires in the summer to come, right now I am grateful to be granted another spring.

The Subject Is Strength

Keep Yourself Strong

 

My previous post on loving care was a reminder to myself as well as to my readers that we need to take care of ourselves, and a couple images of meals I made with spinach pointed directly (with an indirect nod to Popeye the Sailor that younger readers, if any, might have missed) to the importance of building strength. Iron and vitamin D really do improve muscular strength, mass, and function in older adults as well as young people. These days, with every good meal I prepare, I tell myself I am building reserves of strength for an uncertain future. After all, outside of the certainty of eventual death for each and every one of us, the truth is that our futures have always been and always will be uncertain, so don’t wait for tomorrow to start taking care of yourself.

 

Physical activity, mental stimulation, and contact with others is nourishing and important, too. Sometimes when I’m feeling discouraged, it’s hard for me to call a friend, because I don’t want to spread my discouragement to anyone else. If I make the call, though (and sometimes it isn’t until the next day, I admit), before we’ve been talking long, my friend and I transition from commiseration to laughter, and laughing together renews our strength. 

Our playing field

Sunny Juliet and I had some physical activity on a cold Monday, the outdoors made more inviting by the presence of blue sky and sunshine. Frisbee is mental stimulation as well as physical activity for my girl, and often her dear little face makes me laugh with joy.

 

 

A Fable From Aesop

 

Book nerd that I have always been, now that I live alone there is always a book on the dining table, and these days I've been turning to Aesop with my meals. 

As you can see, the cover is attractive, page illustrations charming, but the book itself is falling apart, literally, so I felt no guilt for liberating this shabby treasure from a box of bookstore donations and calling it my own. My 1846 edition is also safely out of copyright, so I’ll be sharing a few more of the 300 fables and illustrations in weeks to come. 

For today, here is “The Lion and the Three Bulls.”

You might wonder where in the world lions and bulls both occur. Facts about Aesop are elusive, and many believe he was not a real person at all. Other scholars place him in the 6^th century BCE and identify him as born enslaved and eventually freed. While his birthplace (if he was, in fact, born) remains an open question, one possibility proposed is Ethiopia, and surely cattle and lions both are part of the fauna of many African countries. I’m content with that speculation. What is most important about Aesop, anyway, are the stories and their lessons.

 

“The Lion and the Three Bulls” is a very brief fable with an obvious and simple lesson. Three bulls graze together in a pasture and are safe as long as they remain together. The lion dares not attack one bull with two other formidable defenders on the scene. When the bulls separate, however, the lion easily takes them on one at a time, and all three lose their lives. 

 

“Union is strength,” is the way my old 19^th-century Routledge volume sums up the fable’s lesson. 

 

Running with that idea--

 

The phrase and general idea of “United we stand! Divided we fall!” has a long history, from the New Testament (Matthew 3:25, Matthew 12:25, Luke 11:17) to Abraham Lincoln (“a house divided against itself”) to the official motto of the state of Kentucky (since 1942) and the flag of the state of Missouri. Going back to pre-Revolutionary times, we find a song by John Dickinson, “The Liberty Song,” with the words “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall!” 

 

Never a sports fan, I learned something new when looking for the idea that we are “stronger together.” Those of you who do follow sports will be familiar with the name Walter Payton, running back for the Chicago Bears. Apparently, Payton’s most well-known words are these: “We are stronger together than we are alone.” This site includes many other wonderful Payton quotes. I'm glad to have learned about him!

 

Similar words were adopted in 2021 by the International Olympic Committee to honor teamwork and the unifying power of sports: “Faster, Higher, Stronger—Together.” Labor unions use such slogans for obvious reasons, pointing to the very reason for their, the unions’, existence. Team sports were not my forte, to put it mildly, and I've never belonged to a union (my paternal grandfather did), but I did play in orchestras for nine years, and an orchestra cannot make music except by making it together. Orchestral music is an ensemble production.

 

Maybe talk of strength in union makes you nervous? Irritates you? You say you’ve worked hard all your life and earned everything you have, with no help from anyone? The truth is that the most rugged individualist who clawed his way up the ladder of success did not spring full-blown out of nowhere but benefitted from a surrounding culture of knowledge and skill and law and examples built up over generations, in this country and others. We all inherit what others gathered and treasured for us before we were even born. Community is a much broader concept than communism, and you can have one without the other. The motto E pluribus unum dates back to 1776. Here's a case for returning to it.

 

Current Events

 

No, I am not going to get into details of the past week’s outrages. The observation I want to make is general. 

 

Most 21^st-century presidential candidates and presidents have vowed to be presidents “for all the people.” Tragically, the candidate who now sits in the Oval Office was not in tune with that popular promise and instead, while yet on the campaign trail, was already vowing vengeance. Retribution, not reconciliation, is his theme song. Now in office, he has wasted no time in making good on his threats.

 

(What is a threat? What is a promise? Do you see them as different? Why or why not?)

 

Calling journalists and Democrats and all Republicans who don’t fall in line with him “enemies,” today’s president encourages his loyalists to follow him in hating and demonizing, dividing rather than uniting. Why? Because keeping us divided distracts us from what everything else he and his henchmen are doing. Because keeping American citizens fighting among themselves lets the gangster billionaires take over. Because keeping us apart in information silos makes us weak. If Americans came together in defense of the rule of law, which "ultimately depends on the citizens" (go back and follow that link!), we would still have plenty of disagreements and plenty to debate and a lot on which to compromise, but surely we could stand united against the threat of autocracy. We would have strength in numbers. —And if our democracy fails to survive, none of the other disagreements will matter, anyway.

Right now, in this cold Michigan February, it's hard to see if and how Americans will ever come together again, isn’t it? But what a tragic waste of human thought and innovation and effort it would be if this country of ours were to slide into “absolute despotism” after being founded expressly to avoid such a fate!

 

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day, to cite the old cliché, and it didn’t fall in a single day, either. The current administration is less than a month old. The wrecking ball started swinging on Day 1, and there has been a lot of destruction already, but we don’t have to sit back and let it continue to happen. We need to remind our members of Congress, our elected representatives, that they took an oath to abide by and defend the Constitution of the United States, and they are not working for the people they supposedly represent if they are knuckling under to a president who would set it aside—or, worse yet, if they are actively aiding and abetting that set-aside.

 

So keep up your strength, lend your strength to others, and draw strength from others, too. I promise (or is it a threat?) more Aesop in the weeks ahead. Other books, too. And if you’re very, very good, more dog news and notes. That’s a promise.

Small readings from small writings bring large thoughts.

"Books are my rivals for her attention!"

When I take on the reading of a very big book, one that will require a long stretch of days and nights to get through, I always have on hand a few volumes of lighter literary weight, fiction or nonfiction or a mixed stack of the two. The past few days, when I finish a chapter from Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith, I’ve turned to a modest book from the category of “books on books,” William Dana Orcutt’s From My Library Walls: A Kaleidoscope of Memories. Published in 1945 under wartime conservation restrictions, the book’s author refers several times to aspects of World War II, but his main topic in each short chapter, or essay, is a memory evoked by a photograph or drawing or framed autograph letter on the walls of his private home library.

Playtime in the single digits!

Lovers and collectors of both art and books will understand my astonishment at the number of framed items Mr. Orcutt found room to hang on his library walls. Though the Artist and I managed to find room for both in our old farmhouse, visual art and bookshelves are always competing for wall space—and the items that prompt Mr. Orcutt’s memories are not, for the most part, pieces of art but framed ephemera he collected along with his books. The memorabilia even includes (he admits in both cases) a couple of items given as gifts not to him but to his wife, though he calls them “my,” not “our” library walls. His home library, I muse in wonder, must have been a very large room! Unfortunately, the book’s only photograph is a portrait of the author. We are not given a look at his library.

Sunny thinks she's cuter than WDO, and she's right!

William Dana Orcutt was born in 1870 in New Hampshire and lived into the 1950s. Entering young into the business of printing set his life’s course: In addition to writing books, he made a career of book and type design, with a reputation as a historian, as well. See this entry on the Dorcester Atheneum if you are interested in the history of American books, because Orcutt is an important figure in that story. His long, rich life, as the book I'm reading makes clear, intersected with many other important literary figures of his day. 

 

But my intention today is not to dwell on Orcutt’s life but to give you an idea of this one little book. He wrote many, most of them larger and more “important,” but anyone interested in American history and literature will find fascinating gems in this small volume. 

A small package reveals gems of history.

Each—let me call them essays--. Each essay in the book is no more than three to six pages in length, reminiscences that are grouped geographically, with the last two parts, “The Literary Hub of the Universe” [Boston] and “Star-Spangled Banner,” devoted to American topics. This Sunday morning I reached those final sections of the book, which were perhaps the most fascinating to me of all, particularly Orcutt’s memories of his relationship to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. 

 

As a schoolboy assigned to memorize Lincoln’s famous speech, young Orcutt pictured in his mind a great auditorium filled with people who received the president’s words with thunderous applause. Years later, when a “charming” volume was issued, reprinting and glorifying the address for a worshipful public, Orcutt happened to meet a “picturesque, elderly military gentleman” who had been a member of the Gettysburg Commission and who was the last living person to have been on the platform at Gettysburg that day! The elderly gentleman sputtered and scoffed at the glorified picture that day given in the new book. He told Orcutt:

 

“…Instead of being greeted as a masterpiece at the time of its delivery, most of those who heard the Address, and practically all the critics, considered it a colossal failure. Lincoln himself was mortified and chagrinned.” 

 

This, we must understand, was after a crowd of 100,000 people had been standing for two solid hours while the speaker of the day, famous orator Edward Everett, the main speaker of the day, read his two-hour-long speech. When Lincoln's turn came, the weary crowd met his brief words with silence, and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, remarked to the man sitting next to him that the president had “made a failure.” With his mind on the war and its human cost, not on polishing his personal legacy for the ages, Lincoln probably did not declaim in strong, ringing tones. And after all, he had been asked to say only a few dedicatory words. 

 

Across the country, newspapers (except for five who reviewed it positively) reported the Address as a flop.

 

…[S]ome even went so far as to criticize its political philosophy. It remained for the Edinburgh Review to discover its greatness. Here the statement was unequivocally made that the Eulogy delivered by Pericles in memory of the heroes of the Peloponnesian War could alone be compared with President Lincoln’s classic words. 

 

Abashed, American editors took another look and changed their tune. All these years later, who in the world ever quotes from Everett’s two-hour speech?

 

I am not—please do not mistake me!—comparing President Biden’s farewell address in stature to Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, but there are a few similarities: Both men were exhausted by the burdens of office when they spoke. Biden, like Lincoln, spoke briefly. Both spoke from the heart of the test the nation was undergoing. 

 

President Biden’s short address to the American people did not receive a failing mark from the country as a whole, but his critics on the Republican side of the aisle (see Fox News if you care to) spared no insult. It’s true that the elderly president, aged by the office (as it ages all who pass through it), as well as struggling against the stutter that he has worked so hard in his political career to overcome, sometimes fumbled his words. “He can’t even read!” jeered his detractors. They called his message the “worst” in history and “dark,” refusing to acknowledge that we are living in dark times, much of that darkness their own intentional creation. 

 

If history survives into the future, which seems rather an open question as this brave new world grows more and more shameless in mendacity and subject to more and more manipulation of fact, perhaps all this will get sorted out. For now, I can only make my own judgment. Without television, I watched President Biden’s entire speech on my little phone screen, and I give him high marks not only for honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness but also for seeing and facing the world as it is and asking us to do the same. I wish I shared his optimism, but certainly I agree that not giving up hope is essential to the future of our country. 

 

On Monday, in honor of the national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., I will be reading from a book on King's life. My radio will be silent. I’ll only look at my phone for texts from family and/or friends. When I come back to this blog with a new post, perhaps by the end of the week, perhaps not until the following week, I'll have a lovely surprise to share. Meanwhile, let's pray for peace in Gaza, freedom for Ukraine, and relief for those made homeless by fires or other blows of fate.

Honor him on January 20.