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That One Detail

Wednesday 13 April 2022

They always miss it — that one detail that changes everything about the ending of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s so small, yet it tells us so much, and it’s a sign of how good an author Harper Lee was. She sets up the situation with a misdirection:

“Mr. Finch.” Mr. Tate was still planted to the floorboards. “Bob Ewell fell on his knife. I can prove it.”

Atticus wheeled around. His hands dug into his pockets. “Heck, can’t you even try to see it my way? You’ve got children of your own, but I’m older than you. When mine are grown I’ll be an old man if I’m still around, but right now I’m—if they don’t trust me they won’t trust anybody. Jem and Scout know what happened. If they hear of me saying downtown something different happened—Heck, I won’t have them any more. I can’t live one way in town and another way in my home.”

Mr. Tate rocked on his heels and said patiently, “He’d flung Jem down, he stumbled over a root under that tree and—look, I can show you.”

Mr. Tate reached in his side pocket and withdrew a long switchblade knife.

We assume that Tate is going to show Atticus how Bob Ewell fell on his knife, and he does just that.

Mr. Tate flicked open the knife. “It was like this,” he said. He held the knife and pretended to stumble; as he leaned forward his left arm went down in front of him. “See there? Stabbed himself through that soft stuff between his ribs. His whole weight drove it in.”

Mr. Tate closed the knife and jammed it back in his pocket. “Scout is eight years old,” he said. “She was too scared to know exactly what went on.”

But that’s not the reason Lee includes that detail. The real reason comes into focus a few paragraphs later:

“Heck,” said Atticus abruptly, “that was a switchblade you were waving. Where’d you get it?”

“Took it off a drunk man,” Mr. Tate answered coolly.

I was trying to remember. Mr. Ewell was on me… then he went down… Jem must have gotten up. At least I thought…

“Heck?”

“I said I took it off a drunk man downtown tonight. Ewell probably found that kitchen knife in the dump somewhere. Honed it down and bided his time… just bided his time.”

The kids were working on it today, and I pointed out that there’s a detail that makes everything different, changes the whole story. “No one has ever managed to see it,” I challenged them, and it’s true: most kids read right over that detail:

“Heck,” said Atticus abruptly, “that was a switchblade you were waving. Where’d you get it?”

“Took it off a drunk man,” Mr. Tate answered coolly.

The drunk man he took it off was Bob Ewell. When Tate arrives to investigate the body, he finds Bob Ewell lying on the ground, a knife in his craw, as he puts it, and a switchblade in his hand. In order to cover up Boo Radley’s involvement, he has to take the switchblade. He tampers with evidence to protect Boo Radley.

Today, though, one girl almost got it. “Mr. Scott, I think it’s something to do with this knife,” she said. She’d read the passage and knew something felt off. What felt off? It’s a detail that doesn’t seem to be connected to anything, and Lee brings it up twice, which means it must be important. I just smiled in response. “Could be something important.”

Later in the day, a couple of hours after class in fact, she emailed me:

I think that the switchblade was Bob Ewells and Heck heard the kids getting attacked and came to the scene and took the switchblade from Bob then Boo Radley, who can see very well in the dark, used a kitchen knife to kill Bob Ewell, making it look like Bob tripped and his death was an accident.

I’m not completely sure if this is right but I have a feeling it is.

“So close,” I replied.

We’ll see tomorrow if she got it.

Faking It

Tuesday 15 February 2022

Juliet is dead now — at least in the eyes of her parents and extended family. Instead of marrying Paris today and going off to live in bliss as her parents anticipated, she has died in her sleep.

It’s strange how easily Friar Laurence manages to steer the family away from all thoughts other than the one he most desperately desires: get her buried as soon as possible, for who knows — from his perspective — what will happen if his potion wears off before they get her in the family crypt.

But why isn’t Capulet more concerned with what happened? How could a young girl die so suddenly? I think the notion, prevalent then, that someone could die of a broken heart goes a long way in explaining this. For Capulet, it’s easy enough just to accept the fact that Juliet never really got over her sorrow for Tybalt’s death, and it was of that broken heart that she died.

Jaggers

Tuesday 11 May 2021

Jaggers — the name just seems to reflect the character. Jagged and dagger-like. There is nothing rounded-off or soft about that man. He is all angles and sharp edges. Like a dagger he seems to cut straight to the heart of most matters. He’s all business at all times. “I am paid for my services or I wouldn’t render them,” he says to Pip.

And yet he takes the care to worry about Pip and his interactions with Drummle, warning him to keep his distance.  In addition, we find in chapter 51, we read

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power: “I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced. Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is still saved.” Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was cleared.”

Here we see him not standing unaffected in the the horror of Victorian London but rather moved to save the one child he can save.

So why that hard, jagged exterior? Perhaps it’s an understandable cynicism about the number of children “he saw in his daily business life [whom] he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.” He has literally seen it all — probably even executions of kids — and it has made him cynical about the level of “justice” the system seems to be metes out to the less fortunate. He knows that a child born into poverty in Victorian England is a child destined to suffer for her entire life. He knows that such poverty in London leads almost always in one direction to prison. The word choice in describing this is so effective as well: he sees them “as so much spawn,” just children produced without thought, without worry about the future or consequences. They’re no more important as individuals as newly-spawned fish in a hatchery, and they’re as easily destroyed.

I wonder if this cynicism reflects Dickens’s own cynicism.

The Gargeries

Monday 10 May 2021

The kids are reading Great Expectations, and this week we’ll be working on how Dickens creates such masterfully drawn and memorable characters.

Two of the characters we’re looking at are Joe Gargery, Pip’s step-father, and his wife whom Pip never calls anything other than “Mrs. Joe.” We first meet her in chapter one, but it’s in the next chapter that we get some background information:

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life.

We get a lot of information in that passage, but since it’s through Pip’s eyes, he fails to see the nuance. Pip says that “she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand” but he also admits that Joe is “a sort of Hercules in strength.” The question then arises: why does Joe allow Mrs. Joe to be abusive both to him and Pip? If we look at what she faced, a few things come into focus: at twenty, she was forced to raise her little brother as her parents joined five of her siblings in the church graveyard. Joe married her because otherwise, a single woman with her infant brother to raise, she would have had most likely to turn to prostitution to support them. Perhaps this has something to do with it.

Tea Party Concluded

Friday 2 April 2021

Students today finished working on the enigmatic twenty-fourth chapter of Mockingbird, which includes this passage that stumps all the kids every year:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that [head] of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

That last line — “His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?” — always leaves students flummoxed, and this year was no exception.

What makes this passage so tricky is the intentional pronoun/antecedent that those in the conversation are employing. Like good, genteel Southern ladies, they can’t be said to be gossiping since they’re not naming names, and no true lady would gossip. But that is of course what they’re doing, and though they’re not using anyone’s name,

The Tea Party

Thursday 1 April 2021

Few chapters are as initially bewildering as the tea party scene in chapter 24 of Mockingbird. It makes little sense because the women are all intentionally being somewhat obtuse, and while they all understand what they’re talking about, Scout is completely lost — as are most of the students.

Our first task was to break it into manageable sections. Afterward, we focused on chunk 1, which is about some previously unknown character named J. Grimes Everett and someone or something known as “those poor Mrunas.”

It’s all a mystery to them, and they work through it meticulously, discovering things here and there with me walking around offering a bit of guidance.

“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What is the antecedent of ’em in that sentence?” I ask one group.

“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What two important inferences can we make from this statement?” I ask another group.

We’ll finish up the work tomorrow.

The Tension Dials Up

Tuesday 19 January 2021

Act 3 scene 1 — everything changes. The challenging becomes almost impossible. Romeo effectively erases any hope of any future with Juliet.

“Things are going to speed up from here on out,” I tell the kiddos.

Various Visions

Friday 8 January 2021

Today, we looked at six performances of various parts of the famous so-called balcony scene. I’d just discovered a new one:

This calm, nuanced performance has become my favorite.

Review: Rules of Civility

Friday 5 June 2020

I wasn’t sure what I thought of this book at first. There wasn’t much of a plot: just some randomly connected incidents pulled together by the simple fact that they were happening to the same character. She goes to a nightclub; she eats dinner somewhere; she does this; she does that.

Then I started picking up on the allusions. This book is jam-packed with them. While there are some allusions to music and art, most of them refer back to novels. And then I started to see that the structure of the novel was itself an allusion to a classic novel we’ve all read. And then I started to see how Towles was taking yet another novel, itself a modern classic, inverting the structure, and placing on top of the allusion to the classic novel.

And then came this passage between a rich New York aristocrat (with a good and pure heart, though) and the narrator, a working-class girl born to Russian Jewish immigrants. The aristocrat is visiting the narrator’s apartment and notices the books:

“You’ve got a lot of books,” he said at last.

“It’s a sickness.”

“Are you … seeing anyone for it?”

“I’m afraid it’s untreatable.”

He put his briefcase and the wine on my father’s easy char and began circling the room with a tilted head.

“Is this the Dewey decimal system?”

“No, but it’s based on similar principles. Those are the British novelists. The French are in the kitchen. Homer, Virgil and the other epics are there by the tub.”

Wallace wandered toward one of the windowsills and plucked Leaves of Grass off a teetering stack.

“I take it the transcendentalists do better in sunlight.”

“Exactly.”

“Do they need much water?”

“Not as much as you’d think. But lots of pruning.”

He pointed the volume toward a pile of books under my bed.

“And the … mushrooms?”

“The Russians.”

This is, at its heart, a book about books, cleverly camouflaged as something else, but it is in essence a giant hat-tip to literature. That’s not all it is, of course, but that’s it’s organizing principle.

I won’t mention what exactly the classic novel and modern classic are — that would be a spoiler. I fear in mentioning them at all I’ve given too much away.

For all it has going for it, though, this novel is clearly a first novel: execution doesn’t quite meet conception. Perhaps Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, which I read first, set me up to expect too much. This is a solid novel, though, and an enjoyable read even if it does drag just a bit at times.

Day 74: Rainy Dickens

Thursday 28 May 2020

Another Rainy Day

We are sick of the rain. Simply sick of it. Every day for the last — how long has it even been? A week? Day in, day out, at some point during every single day, it rains. The air is heavy and moist, and it’s just not a pleasant experience — though it could be worse with all the flooding others are getting.

Today, we finally got outside in the afternoon. It was muggy but sunny. What else could we do but head back to our new fort location and work on it. Doing what exactly? Well, chopping things down.

Some things were much easier to chop than others. The mushy, termite-infested stump we discovered to be such a few months back when I gave what appeared to be a 10-foot stump a push and broke it off about two feet from the ground — that stump is quite solid a little further down.

Of course, the sprinkles that filled the morning and early afternoon and kept us inside came back with friends in the early evening just as we got back from our walk.

I took a few experimental shots — long exposure. Long exposure for daylight pictures. The above image was about 15 seconds. I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish — get streaks of rain in the image, I guess — but it just turned out to be a bland shot of our front yard.

Later in the evening, we tried it inside. When I explained what a long exposure inside would do, the kids thought it was a very unique idea. “Make us ghosts!”

Done.

Dickensian Commonalities

I’ve been listening to Dickens’s Dombey and Son on Spotify this week — the first time in close to 20 years that I’ve read a new (to me) Dickens book. One of the things that I’m enjoying most is the simple pleasure of discovering new examples of Dickensian acerbic wit, like this:

After the lapse of some minutes, which appeared an immense time to little Paul Dombey on the table, Doctor Blimber came back. The Doctor’s walk was stately, and calculated to impress the juvenile mind with solemn feelings. It was a sort of march; but when the Doctor put out his right foot, he gravely turned upon his axis, with a semi-circular sweep towards the left; and when he put out his left foot, he turned in the same manner towards the right. So that he seemed, at every stride he took, to look about him as though he were saying, “Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any subject, in any direction, on which I am uninformed? I rather think not.”

Add to that a classic Dickensian name — can there be a more inept educator than someone named Doctor Blimber? — and it just brought out of me a loud laugh.

I’m discovering too that this is another example of Dickensian exposes on the Victorian view of children, which often enough bordered on abuse. And as always, Dickens does it with a flourish of humor that still has enough darkness around the edges to make the reader shudder just a little at what the child must be going through.

Poor Paul Dombey, at six, has been deposited at a boarding school in an effort to make up lost time in his education due to his generally ill condition. The headmaster, Dr. Blimber of above, is known for instilling in the children a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin grammar and little else and of assuming that he’s aptly prepared his pupils for the challenges of life. Paul, on his second day of school, is given a pile of books to read and master. He does the best he can with them:

‘Now, Dombey,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘How have you got on with those books?’

They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin—names of things, declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and preliminary rules—a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul had spelt out number two, he found he had no idea of number one; fragments whereof afterwards obtruded themselves into number three, which slided into number four, which grafted itself on to number two. So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was troy weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.

‘Oh, Dombey, Dombey!’ said Miss Blimber, ‘this is very shocking.’

‘If you please,’ said Paul, ‘I think if I might sometimes talk a little to old Glubb, I should be able to do better.’

‘Nonsense, Dombey,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘I couldn’t hear of it. This is not the place for Glubbs of any kind. You must take the books down, I suppose, Dombey, one by one, and perfect yourself in the day’s instalment of subject A, before you turn at all to subject B. I am sorry to say, Dombey, that your education appears to have been very much neglected.’

‘So Papa says,’ returned Paul; ‘but I told you—I have been a weak child. Florence knows I have. So does Wickam.’

‘Who is Wickam?’ asked Miss Blimber.

‘She has been my nurse,’ Paul answered.

‘I must beg you not to mention Wickam to me, then,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘I couldn’t allow it’.

‘You asked me who she was,’ said Paul.

Bear in mind that Paul at this point is six years old. “How is your Latin grammar?” asks the headmaster. “I am sorry to say, Dombey, that your education appears to have been very much neglected,” declares his tutor, the headmaster’s daughter. Just what were they expecting of a six-year-old boy?

Day 69: Training, Cleaning, and Reading

Saturday 23 May 2020

Our pup has come a very long way. I thought, when we got her, that since she’s a border collie (smartest breed on the planet, right?), things would be easy. She’d be easy to train, easy to control (after all, you can get those dogs to do the most amazing tricks herding sheep), easy to house-break — just easy. But it turns out that BCs are too smart for their own good: it makes them a little stubborn at times. And that describes our Clover perfectly: stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. But we didn’t give up on her: we took her for some obedience training, we left her a couple of times for one-on-one days with a trainer, and for the last year, things have been going great.

Now, we have a few tricks with her.

  • You can, for instance, drop a piece of the most tempting meat in front of her and she’ll just sit down at it, shifting her gaze from the meat to you and back to the meat, a pleading look in her eye, and she won’t touch it until you tell her, “Eat.”
  • In the morning, you can open the door and tell her, “Siusiu,” and she’ll go out and immediately relieve her self and come back inside.
  • You can call her and she comes and sits beside you.
  • If you want her on the other side, just say “Other side” and she’ll switch sides.
  • You can tell her to stay and then kick ever her most beloved ball and she won’t go darting after it until you tell her “free” or “go get it” or “release.”
  • “Heel” means “heel.”
  • When you’re taking her for a walk and stop moving, she sits — sometimes immediately, but usually after a bit of hesitation. (There’s that stubbornness.)

For her birthday, though, we got her an agility course. The Girl began training her yesterday. It was fairly simple: she figured out that she had to jump over the bar, had to jump through the hoop. Easy-peasy. She looked up at L like she looks up at me when we go for a run: “Was that supposed to be a challenge or something?”

Today, the Boy got in on the fun. He had a little difficulty getting her to jump without a leash on her to guide her, but soon enough, he’d worked out his own way of bribing her with a little treat.

My Ántonia

I finished reading My Ántonia today — or rather, listening to it on Spotify. I first read that book in college, and it astounded me, particularly one quote: “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” More than O, Pioneers! (the only other Cather book I’ve read), I really connected with the sense of nostalgia that pervades My Ántonia. That’s why I remember that quote almost a quarter of a century later: I read it shortly after some emotionally traumatic losses (not deaths, just losses) in my life, and I was wallowing in nostalgia about those lost relationships.

Illustration: Immigrant family huddled together on the train platform

I had forgotten, though, about the ending:

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

“What a little circle man’s experience is.” What a lovely notion, what a great truth.

Returning to Dickens

“What to listen to now?” I thought, as I finished the Cather novel early in the day and still had plenty of outside work to keep me occupied. Much of the morning I spent cleaning rocks. Yes, cleaning rocks. The drainage trough (for lack of a better term) I made at the base of our driveway has, over the years, become more and more clogged with dirt. Now instead of wicking water away from the drive, it just serves as a barrier and makes it puddle water. What’s more, with all that dirt, weeds had a great place to grow. So I pulled out all the rocks down to the landscaping fabric, washed the dirt off the rocks, and put them back. (Coronavirus quarantine has lent itself to long-ignored, not-necessarily-critical projects.) Anyway, I was still working on the rocks and the book finished.

Spotify is sort of hit-or-miss with audiobooks: there’s very little (that I’ve found) that’s relatively recent, and a lot of the older books are actually in translation — lots and lots of German audiobooks I’ve found.

When I lived in Poland, I had some difficulty finding affordable English-language books. Penguin Classis, though, were plentiful and relatively cheap. That’s how I read almost every Dickens book in the space of three years. There are a few that I never found, though, and I thought today might be a good day to return to Dickens.

I hadn’t really read him in almost twenty years. I teach Great Expectations some years to my English I Honors students, but that doesn’t really count: the last year I taught it (two years ago, I think), I didn’t even read it with the students.

So today I began Dombey and Son. I’d forgotten how clever and witty Dickens can be, and how gifted he can be at beginning a novel. Think of his most famous, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Or my personal favorite Dickens beginning, which I’ve mentioned here before, Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Dombey, though, has a clever opening:

Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good time—remorseless twins they are for striding through their human forests, notching as they go—while the countenance of Son was crossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.

Of course, Dickens can be tiring with all his subplots and sub-subplots (after all, the longer he stretched novels, which were always published in syndication in magazines, the more money he could make from a given book), but I’m thinking he’ll be a lot easier to listen to than read.

Day 64: Working, Ending, and Reading

Monday 18 May 2020

Working and Ending

We’re nearing the end of the year — only a couple of weeks to go. These weeks promise to be anything but typical. For one thing, I’m giving assignments with the understanding, on both sides, that I will provide minimal feedback and that the grade depends more on effort than accuracy. That’s the district policy during our quarantine teaching. It might be the state policy. So some kids do their absolute best, like this analysis of chapter 24 of To Kill a Mockingbird:

Chapter 24 is important because it shows how the town of Maycomb isn’t as “Christian” or as “nice” as they claim to be. For example, Mrs. Farrow Mentions how they can educate them and try to make them Christians but till there will be, “no lady safe in her bed.” The antecedent ambiguity that Mrs. Farrow makes using “them” as in the African Americans shows a sense of judgment she has towards them. Not only that but when she mentions how much they are fighting a losing battle and women still can’t be safe shows the hierarchy these white people have put themselves in showing that no matter what an African American will never be better as a person of white ethnicity. Similarly, Merriweather states how there are some, “Misguided people” in the town who think they were “Doing right”, but all they did was “Stir [them] up.” This second case of antecedent ambiguity this time towards Atticus shows the real hypocrisy of Mrs. Merriweather. Mrs.Maudie backs that up with a remark showing how Mrs. Merrieweather doesn’t feel any ounce of remorse talking trash, but eating Atticus’ food. Showing how really bad Mrs. Merriweather actually is.

Other students don’t turn in anything. Despite calls to parents. Despite emails. Despite encouragement. Despite the constant reminder that this the only time they’ll have to pull in a handful of 100s (nine of them, in fact) for simply doing the work. Just putting forth the most minimal effort. It’s frustrating, not to mention tiring.

The Boy, though, gets no mercy. Just try to skip something, or not do his absolute best — K is on him to get everything done, and when she’s not, I am. Truth be told, though, she’s done the lion’s share of the work with him — probably something like 95% of the work with him even if I’m being generous with myself. I have spent most of that time in the basement, “grading” things, sending emails, planning things, meeting on Google Meet. She has kept him on his toes, kept his nose to the cliche grindstone, which means she’s been keeping her own to the grindstone as well.

I am usually keeping my own students’ noses to the cliche at this time of year, especially the English I students. They’ll soon be writing their letters to next year’s students, and I have to make sure their final impressions of the class will help them create the appropriate first impressions in next year’s classes. They’re usually finishing up Great Expectations or Lord of the Flies at this point in the year. They’re out of breath, academic legs aching, making the last mad dash for the finish, and I’m there cheering them on and behind them whipping them faster, mixing metaphors left and right. The letter is supposed to be completed in one class period. That’s what makes it so impressive to the students next year.

“How would you rate this letter’s organization?” I ask. They usually are moderately impressed.

“How would you rate this letter’s length?” I ask. They usually are moderately impressed.

“How would you rate this letter’s persuasiveness?” I ask. They usually are moderately impressed.

“Last year’s students wrote these letters in one class period. These are, therefore, first drafts.” I pause for effect. Everyone begins looking at each other. “Whose opinion of these letters has risen noticeably?” Every hand — every single one — goes up.

And this year? How can I make sure each student only spends the equivalent of one class period on her letter? In short, I can’t.

Not the end of the world, but frustrating.

Reading

E and I finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea last night. After complaining about how he didn’t understand everything for the last couple of weeks, he changed his tune when I realized we wouldn’t find out what happened to Captain Nemo.

“Is there a sequel?”

“I think there is. Or at least he appears in another book,” I say.

“Can we read it?”

No — not now. Enough Jules Verne for now.

Our next book: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We begin with a history and culture lesson: I talk to the Boy about the n-word. It appears in the book. There’s no escaping it. He’ll encounter it in one way or another soon enough.

Then we begin reading. I’m hoping he’ll find it amusing. If he doesn’t… well, I guess we’ll have to try something else. But soon enough, he’s laughing:

The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom checked his whistle. A stranger was before him—a boy a shade larger than himself. A new-comer of any age or either sex was an impressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy was well dressed, too—well dressed on a week-day. This was simply astounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his close-buttoned blue cloth roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes on—and it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a bright bit of ribbon. He had a citified air about him that ate into Tom’s vitals. The more Tom stared at the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his nose at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own outfit seemed to him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other moved—but only sidewise, in a circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the time. Finally, Tom said:

“I can lick you!”

“I’d like to see you try it.”

“Well, I can do it.”

“No you can’t, either.”

“Yes I can.”

“No you can’t.”

“I can.”

“You can’t.”

“Can!”

“Can’t!”

The Boy is laughing so hard by the time we get here. We reenact the dialogue a number of times, each time to more uproarious laughter. I’m not sure what he finds more amusing: the idea of “whip” meaning “to beat up” or repetition of assertion and denial.

We continue:

An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said:

“What’s your name?”

“’Tisn’t any of your business, maybe.”

“Well I ’low I’ll make it my business.”

“Well why don’t you?”

“If you say much, I will.”

“Much—much—much. There now.”

The whole “much-much-much” just about doubled him over. It’s what an eight-year-old might do, after all.

After his evening dental hygiene session (what a way to describe an eight-year-old boy brushing his teeth), we embark on chapter two, the most famous of all Twain’s passages: the whitewashing scene.

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with—and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar—but no dog—the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

The idea of “a dead rat and a string to swing it with” was just terribly amusing for the Boy.

As he was drifting off to sleep, he remembered another favorite line — once I explained key vocabulary — and muttered it one last time: “would have bankrupted every boy in the village.”

Day 51: Seeing Anew

Tuesday 5 May 2020

Atticus Finch — what a hero. What a fantastic lawyer. That’s what we all walk away thinking the first time we read To Kill a Mockingbird. We read his cross-examination of Bob and Mayella Ewell and think, “He did a really good job establishing Tom’s innocence,” and can’t understand how Tom could be found guilty– though we can understand it because it’s Depression-era Alabama.

The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant.

Nailed it — keep hammering on the fact that no doctor was called, Atticus.

She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.

Her father saw it, and the defendant has testified as to his remarks. What did her father do? We don’t know, but there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led almost exclusively with his left. We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did: he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant, no doubt signing it with his left hand, and Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses—his right hand.

There it is — that brilliant evidence that someone lefthanded inflicted the bruises on the right side of Mayella’s face. Tom’s left arm was mangled in a cotton gin when he was young — he couldn’t have done it. Case closed.

And then that impassioned closing:

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.

What a perfect defense! What insight! What an amazing job defending a man in a hopeless situation!

That’s what we think when we’re not lawyers, though. But what about a trial lawyer who’s had twenty years’ experience in the courtroom? Someone who’s represented defendants against charges of rape and murder?

During the 2018/2019 school year

Every year, as the kids finish up Mockingbird, I have Jim Bannister, a local defense attorney, come in and walk the kids through the details of the trial and evidence. He’s been doing this presentation for some years, ever since a friend’s daughter read the book. The friend asked him what he thought of Atticus’s defense and, not having read the book since middle school, Bannister reread the chapters dealing with the trial.

“I would have handled things a little differently,” he remarked. “To be fair,” he’s always added when talking to the kids, “Atticus seems to be a tax and/or estate lawyer, so he was not in his area of specialization at all.” Still, he helps the kids see the mountains of evidence that Atticus could have brought into the trial that doesn’t even get a mention.

The most damning evidence does appear in the book, but Atticus doesn’t push it hard enough: no doctor was ever called.  This means there’s no evidence that the crime even took place. But there’s so much more than that.

What about clothing the accused and supposed victim were wearing? How could Tom, who’s left arm is all but useless, hold down Mayella as she claimed, take off his clothes, take off her clothes, and rape her while using only one arm? It doesn’t make sense — it’s physically impossible.

What about defensive wounds on Tom? Mayella said she fought him “tooth and nail.” There should have been scratches all over Tom’s face.

What about the window through which Bob says he saw the rape in progress? Earlier in the book, the Ewell house is described and we discover that there’s cheesecloth over the windows instead of glass panes. How clean was that cheesecloth? How much could Bob actually see?

And if his daughter was being raped and all that stood between him and the rapist was a bit of cheesecloth over a window no more than three feet above the ground, why didn’t he dive through the window and attack Tom? Instead, he claims he witnesses the rape in the front room and runs around the entire shotgun house and enters through the back door.

All these were failures on the part of Heck Tate, the sheriff, who did absolutely no investigation at all. “I would tear him apart on the stand,” Bannister laughs.

For me, though, the most jaw-dropping piece of evidence was a little gem hidden in Tom’s account of the event.

“Mr. Finch, I was wonderin’ why it was so quiet like, an‘ it come to me that there weren’t a chile on the place, not a one of ’em, and I said Miss Mayella, where the chillun?”

Tom’s black velvet skin had begun to shine, and he ran his hand over his face.

“I say where the chillun?” he continued, “an‘ she says—she was laughin’, sort of—she says they all gone to town to get ice creams. She says, ‘took me a slap year to save seb’m nickels, but I done it. They all gone to town.’”

Tom’s discomfort was not from the humidity. “What did you say then, Tom?” asked Atticus.

“I said somethin‘ like, why Miss Mayella, that’s right smart o’you to treat ’em. An‘ she said, ’You think so?‘ I don’t think she understood what I was thinkin’—I meant it was smart of her to save like that, an‘ nice of her to treat em.”

Why in the world didn’t Atticus call to the stand that ice cream salesman?! Everybody in the town knows the Ewells; everyone knows how poor they are. To see all seven of them come traipsing up with nickels in hand to buy ice cream would have been a once-in-a-lifetime, always-remember-it moment.

So he comes every year to lead students through these pieces of evidence, suggesting at the outset that they pretend like he’s the lead attorney and they are his paralegals, investigators, and co-attorneys. “Let’s see if we can’t put together a better defense for Tom Robinson.”

Except he couldn’t come this year for all the obvious reasons. Yet when I asked him if he’d be willing to give it a shot on Google Meet, he didn’t hesitate: “What dates are we looking at?”

And so he sat in his study and led several of my students through a discussion via Google Meet, and my eighth-grade vice principal (well, she will be next year after our current, much-loved vice principal retires) popped in eagerly when I told her what we were planning.

Despite the frustration of the lockdown, it was a good day to be a teacher.

The Day’s Adventures

The Boy has wanted to build a bamboo structure of some sort for some time now. He had in his mind a large and grand structure, perhaps with a swimming pool beside it and a diving platform coming out of the second story.

Heading down to play in the creek after “school”

Today, I suggested a little more modest structure: “We could simply use the corner of our fence and Mr. F’s fence and build it there.

Looking for minnows

And so we went out into the stand of bamboo growing in Mr. F’s back yard (more or less — not really sure of property lines there) and took a few canes.

Dew-laden web, photo by the Girl

We stripped off the small branches on which grow the leaves, cut them to length,

dug a few holes, and we had our basic frame. A little more work and we had a functional structure.

A good day to be a dad.

Day 50: Death In the Creek?

Monday 4 May 2020

During the warmer months, the creek that runs through the backyards of our street becomes a frequent destination for us. Of late, this has been because of the minnows that flourish in the small stream.

I find myself wondering how in the world the little fish survive. What do they eat? According to one site, “Bluntnose minnows eat algae, aquatic insect larvae, diatoms, and small crustaceans called entomostracans.” I don’t know if these are bluntnose minnows, but that was the first thing Google turned up when I asked, “what do minnows in streams eat.” That makes sense.

Their presence also solves another mystery: what do the snapping turtles in the creek eat? That and frogs, I guess.

We were in the creek three times today. The first was in the morning, a session that included a bit of minnow netting and some bamboo harvesting.

The Boy has been watching videos on YouTube showing young men in some south Asian country (Malaysia? Indonesia?) who dig vast underground spaces or build impressive bamboo houses using only the most primitive of tools and resources. He has decided that he wants to do the same. This morning, then, we cut down a couple of bamboo canes for this project. The Boy wanted to get more, but I put him off, hoping his obsession with this project would wane a bit when he realized it’s impossibility for a seven-year-old boy. Still, I want to encourage him to try, hence today’s harvest.

After we took down the canes, it was time for a little minnowing. The Boy as a curious and amusing approach that seems counterintuitive but works: he sneaks up to where the minnows are gathering, then leaps into the water, thrusting the net in before him and waving it about violently in the water.

It seems like it would never work, but it does.

Occasionally, the minnows have caused a bit of consternation in the house. The first minnows he caught spent the night in a Mason jar on the kitchen counter. When K went down in the morning, one of the two minnows was floating on the surface of the water. Not wanting to risk the other’s life, K took the jar and sprinted down to the creek to release the survivor.

This prompted a new rule: minnows can be held in captivity until bedtime. When the Boy comes up for his bedtime ritual, the minnows need to be back in their own habitat. That worked for a couple of days until yesterday, when one of the minnows leaped out of the jar as it sat on the deck, flopped about on the deck board, then slipped in between two boards to its death in the leaves and chaos that exists under our deck.

“Minnow murderer!” the Girl exclaimed.

So now the jar stays in the house and minnows are released only moments after they’re caught.

Today, though, we discovered much more than minnows. During our afternoon session, we decided to head to the waterfall that’s just upstream. This means a short jaunt through the woods, approaching the stream from above. E started out toward the rocks and then suddenly started yelling.

“Daddy! Daddy! Come quick! It’s a snake! A snake! And it’s eating!” There was excitement and fear in his voice: he loves snakes, but he’s terrified of the thought of encountering a venomous one. He seems to think they’re conscious of their deadly venom and somewhat maleficent to boot. “What if they just chase me down and attack me?”

I try to reassure him when he says things like that, and today was no different: “Buddy, to him, you’re a huge, terrifying monster!”

“But how? They’re packed with venom.”

“They don’t know that.”

“They don’t?!” The Boy was having trouble comprehending that. How can a snake be so deadly and yet not realize its power?

I’m no snake expert to say the least, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t a venomous snake. The eyes, the shape of the head, its markings. But what about those markings? They’re awfully close to a cottonmouth’s markings except the dark triangles rest fat side on the belly of the snake — the whole pattern of this snake inverted.

Still, no need to take chances. We left the snake to its dinner and headed home.

I did a little research when we got home and came to the tentative conclusion that it might be a plain-bellied water snake, which is not venomous. Still, it got me thinking: what if it had been a cottonmouth and the Boy was bitten? Cottonmouths don’t have venom that kills humans, but it can make one very sick. But what about a little boy? We’ve tromped about those rocks where the snake was eating dinner countless times.

Explaining

It was another one of those realizations that threats lurk around us constantly and we’re mostly unaware of them. Our current global reality is a reminder that we are far from the top dogs on the planet in a number of ways, and yet we’re the only species that could burn the whole thing to a radioactive cinder.

While I was cooking dinner over an open flame in our new fire pit, I listened to The Scarlet Letter again, and once again, an echo of the day:

Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.

Two hundred years had passed from the events of the book to the narration of the book, and in the meantime, the country had grown a little less Puritanical and a little more tolerant. Hawthorne seems to see some hope in this. Perhaps we all should

Day 48: Scarlet Projects

Saturday 2 May 2020

This morning I had a little epiphany that I should have had months ago: “I’ll bet there are lots of audiobooks on Spotify.” I know — an obvious thought I should have had long ago, but I am sometimes a little slow on the up-take. I did a quick search and discovered that almost any classic one could imagine is there. Shouldn’t have been a surprise.

A month or so ago, I’d pulled from the bookshelf a novel I’ve been wanting on and off to re-read since college, The Scarlet Letter. I hadn’t really liked it a lot then, and I liked it even less in high school, but I reasoned that, being twenty-five years older than when I’d last read it, I might see something more in it.

For one thing, it’s been a different read because I finally made it through the opening section, “The Custom House.” When we read it in college, we were supposed to read that seemingly disconnected introduction but I didn’t. Today, I listened to it while I worked on our broken smoke, cleaning off the base blocks before screwing down the barrel that serves as the body of the smoker and then covering all the base in concrete. The job took about an hour and a half because I spent some time trying to pry off the leaking quick-connector on the hose before mixing the concrete, to no avail; the intro itself took considerably longer to complete.

And what of “The Custom House”? It’s a fictionalized attempt at making the story seem authentic by making it something of a found-footage type novel (mixing media there, I know). Was that novel (no pun in intended)? I really don’t know.

When the novel began, I was back in familiar territory. I’d initially forgotten about that opening, with the rose outside the jail door, but once that portion began, it was like hearing a long-forgotten-but-once-loved song again after twenty years:

[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to[53] issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

While I was working on the smoker, the Boy was working to remove the last bit of flaking paint from the bench we brought from Nana’s and Papa’s to use by our firepit.

I went inside to get the drill and impact driver and by the time I came back out, he’d disappeared.

“It’s too hard!” he exclaimed. I think he understood that I expected him to get all the paint off.

By the time I was ready to work on the next project of the day, the novel was introducing its heroine, Hester Prynne.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

The scarlet letter is a double symbol: it is a symbol to the characters in the novel of Hester’s sin and depravity as well as a symbol for Hester herself of her resistance. For readers, it’s both these things, but it also represents the hypocrisy of Puritans, among other things.

At this point, I’m about halfway through the novel, though completely through the day’s projects (as is L). More thoughts coming later, I’m sure.

A Tale of Two Books

Monday 3 February 2020

About a year ago I read Treasure Island to the Boy. It took us a long time because I read the original, unabridged version. E loved it.

“Daddy, can we read Treasure Island again?” he asked the other day. I thought it might be a good idea to try to read another classic adventure tale instead of re-reading that one, so I suggested Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I read the opening to him:

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.

For some time past vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.

He was hooked.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Well, that’s what the whole book is about.”

In the course of the opening pages, the longitude and latitude of various sightings. I tried to explain to him what the coordinate system was, but he was a little lost. This evening, after dinner, we looked on Google Earth and mapped out the precise locations of all the sightings of the mysterious creature.

While he was eating his snack, I read another chapter to him. It’s kind of slow going: he asks for definitions of a lot of words, and the sentences are so long, with so many embedded subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, that it’s hard for him to follow. Here’s an example:

Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times–rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length–we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all.

That’s one sentence — it would give my own students fits.

It is in these sentences, though, and the challenging vocabulary that I find the lasting value in the reading. Sure, we’ll have great memories to share; certainly, we’ll enjoy the book. But when it’s time to tackle things like this on his own in school, he’ll have some experience with it because he’ll have heard me reading Jules Verne and Robert Stevenson and eventually Twain and Dickens.

After the Boy was in bed, I was in L’s room, talking to her about the books she’s reading. I’d had in my mind that I wanted to start reading to L again, and I thought A Tale of Two Cities might be a good start. So I asked her if I could read her something.

“Sure,” she said fairly emotionlessly — it’s a thirteen-year-old thing, I’m discovering.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

As I was reading, she jumped up, skipped over to her bookbag, and dug out her social studies notes. “We went over that in class!” she said excitedly.

She looked through her notes and I saw a heading “The Reign of Terror.”

“That’s where it will be,” I said.

We talked about it for a bit, and that was it. Will we go through with this reading? Does she even want to? I don’t know. I understand less and less of her thirteen-year-old mind, but I know that just being there is often enough. Do I do that enough? It’s the worry of every parent, I suppose.

Overheard

Tuesday 26 November 2019

Student 1: “Scylla and Charybdis — aren’t those names of Sirens?”

Student 2: “No, no — that’s the six-headed monster and the garbage disposal.”

At my request, Student 2 later illustrated her summary of that portion of the Odyssey.

Reread

Thursday 2 May 2019

The sign of a good book is that when you reread it, you notice something new in it — no matter how many times you reread it. My favorite book of all time passes that test easily: I’ve read Absalom, Absalom! at least six times, maybe more, and every time, I catch something new. And with language like this, who cares if you see something new:

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin , Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty- three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.

What an opening to a novel!

This year I’m teaching Lord of the Flies for the first time in probably five years, and so as might be expected, I’m rereading it. Goodness, that is a great book with layer upon layer upon layer.

I was reading it today when I noticed anew the change: the boys at first change “Kill the pig! Cut it throat! Spill its blood!” but then change it to “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood.” That got me thinking about the nature of the beast itself.

Finally trying out the “new” (i.e., from Christmas) equipment

At first, it’s just the littleuns’ fears, but with the landing of the dead pilot still attached to his parachute, the beast becomes something they can see. The beast is unknown. There is a logical explanation, a perfectly natural explanation, but the boys turn immediately to the supernatural.

This first happens when the twins are reporting about their encounter with the beast. In reality, all they do is see the decaying body of the pilot from a distance. When the wind pulls on the parachute, the body pulls up, and the boys panic and run. They make it back to the other boys and explain:

“That was awful. It kind of sat up—”

“The fire was bright—”

“We’d just made it up—”

“—more sticks on—”

“There were eyes—”

“Teeth—”

“Claws—”

“We ran as fast as we could—”

“Bashed into things—”

“The beast followed us—”

“I saw it slinking behind the trees—”

“Nearly touched me—”

At this point, even the bigger boys become convinced. Without realizing it, they create a cult of worship around it. They make a sacrifice for the beast and create a ritualistic dance and chant.

Later, Jack uses the beast to maintain control.

“—and then, the beast might try to come in. You remember how he crawled—”

The semicircle shuddered and muttered in agreement.

“He came—disguised. He may come again even though we gave him the head of our kill to eat. So watch; and be careful.”

Stanley lifted his forearm off the rock and held up an interrogative finger.

“Well?”

“But didn’t we, didn’t we—?”

He squirmed and looked down.

“No!”

In the silence that followed, each savage flinched away from his individual memory.

“No! How could we—kill—it?”

“If I ever suggest I’m not teaching this book again,” I told a fellow English teacher this morning, “slap me.”

Beginning Lord of the Flies

Wednesday 1 May 2019

My kids are reading Lord of the Flies as their final selection in English I Honors. It’s been years since I last taught it; it’s been even longer since I actually read it.

As I reread it, passages that never stood out as significant take on new importance. For example, Ralph laments the fact that there are no adults who “could get a message to us,” expressing a fear that many of the boys have: “If only they could send us something grown-up.. . . a sign or something.” The next paragraph reads:

A thin wail out of the darkness chilled them and set them grabbing for each other. Then the wail rose, remote and unearthly, and turned to an inarticulate gibbering. Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him.

Young Percival is doing exactly what his parents taught him: he’s lost, and he’s simply reciting his address.

“If you’re ever lost,” we can imagine his parents calmly telling him, “find a police officer and tell him your address.”

“The Vicar- vicar,” Percival, who is six, struggles.

“Vicarage,” his father, obviously an Anglican priest, prompts.

“The Vicarage, Hardcourt…”

“No, son. No ‘d.’ Just ‘Harcourt.”

“Harcourt…”

They practice it a while. It becomes a morning chant with breakfast, an afternoon game, an evening blessing.

When he has it, he’s got it for good. He recites it at blistering speed a few days later through smiling lips.

“That’s wonderful!” his mother applauds.

And now, trying to come to grips with the terrors that plague him endlessly, he falls back on his incantation — what a wonderful choice of words — and tries to will himself out of the place. He can’t be convinced that there is no beast lurking on the island, but he has no idea what he should really fear.

The older boys do, though. Jack and Ralph have begun their irrevocable split, with Jack resorting to his first violent act: punching Piggy in the stomach and then knocking his glasses off, simultaneously blinding Piggy and cutting all the boys off from civilization, as it was Piggy’s glasses they used to light the signal fire.

“I know there isn’t no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn’t no fear, either.”

Piggy paused.

“Unless—”

Ralph moved restlessly.

“Unless what?”

“Unless we get frightened of people.”

I imagine my own six-year-old in this situation, watching the closest things to adults around him — the boys of thirteen and fourteen — descend into fighting and arguing, with chaos unimaginable just days away, and I shudder.

When we reach this part of the book, I’m going to break with tradition and help the kids see all the foreshadowing. “If you’re not terrified imagining yourself in this situation, you’re not really reading this book.”

Sunday in the Park

Sunday 10 January 2016

The patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía, spent the last days of his life under the chestnut tree in the courtyard of his home. Even when villagers carried his body to his bed as his end became increasingly obviously near, he woke and went back to the tree every morning as “a habit of his body.” Thus Marquez describes it in his classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I am re-reading some twenty or twenty-five years after I first read it. The idea of a habit of one’s body stuck with me all these years, and tonight, when I finally read that scene, I smiled. It was one of the passages of the novel I couldn’t recall where exactly it fell but read eagerly in search of it.

Part of the joy of watching children, I think, is that they have no habits of the body yet. They don’t get up at five thirty and make the morning coffee without thinking about it. They don’t come to an intersection intending to turn right but pulling into the left lane out of habit. They don’t have a routine they follow in which they suddenly become aware they’re half-way through the routine. Every action is new. Every action has a certain uncertainty to it that demands their attention and their care. Every act brings forth a joy of the novel.