"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
“The master condition not only of any future developments in the West but of the maintenance and safeguarding of what exists there now, is the development and conservation of water production. Water, which is rigidly limited by the geography and climate, is incomparably more important than all other natural resources in the West put together.”
–Bernard de Voto, quoted in “American Places,” by Wallace Stegner
As elegant a statement as you can find to explain what all the ruckus is about.
A friend passes these on:
“And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma. A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath. It is not like stopping altogether has something to do with going on, but taking a breath well you are always taking a breath and why emphasize one breath rather than another breath. Anyway that is the way I felt about it and I felt that about it very very strongly. And so I almost never used a comma. The longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I had following one after another, the more the very more I had of them the more I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma.
“So that is the way I felt about punctuation in prose, in poetry it is a little different but more so …”
— Gertrude Stein
And Oscar Wilde has this to say on the subject:
“I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.”
“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well ? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, — I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”
Happy James Joyce’s Birthday (born 1882).
Happy Groundhog Day. I arose before dawn and saw the International Space Station cross the southern sky. Not sure what that means in terms of how many weeks of winter we have left.
Happy Halfway from Winter Solstice to Spring Equinox Day.
There — that’s enough to celebrate for one day.
A week before Christmas, while I was visiting family in Chicago and environs, I drove out to the south suburbs to see two old friends, Jane and Mort. They were teachers at my high school, Crete-Monee. Mort taught English and writing, and we formed a lasting bond over that. I became friends with Jane when she married Mort. We’ve stayed in close enough touch that I still try to drop in once in a while, and I’ve never forgotten their phone number. For the afternoon and evening I was at their house in Crete last month, we talked up a storm, lit the last of the Hanukkah candles, and ate pizza. By the time I left to drive back to the North Side, a weak, intermittent snow was falling. I gassed up in University Park, which I still think of as Park Forest South or even Wood Hill, then drove west on Exchange and north on Monee Road toward our old house.
I parked first down near the bridge over Thorn Creek, at the intersection with Monee and Stuenkel roads. That’s the picture above. I remember that corner during a heavy pre-Christmas snowstorm one night when I was 16 or so. I think school had let out for the holiday earlier that day, and then it started to snow. One of our friends from the road was coming back from college in Iowa. We roamed the neighborhood–it consisted of a couple short stretches of rural roads–and marveled at how heavy the snow was and how quickly it was piling up. We wound up beneath the lamp on the corner, talking, watching the snow come down through the light, talking some more. Maybe there was some snowball mischief involved.
After I took the picture, I got in the car and started to drive toward Park Forest. But I thought, no, I wanted to go up our old road and see if there was anything to be seen up there.
Oak Hill Drive was a quarter-mile long lane, arrow straight through stands of oak and maple and up a little rise, barely wide enough for two cars. It was gravel when we moved onto the road in 1966, and there was always a swampy, potholed stretch about a third of the way up that seemed immune to all efforts to fix it. Walking up there in the dark, it seemed almost inevitable you’d stumble into one of the muddy ruts. The road was eventually tarred and chipped, then paved at some point.
I drove up to the end, where the road ends in a cul de sac and where our old driveway follows a fence line into the trees. I parked in the turn-around–aware the whole time of what we had always thought when we saw a car come to a stop out there and douse its lights: “Someone’s up to no good.” But I parked anyway, got out of the car, and walked back down the road.
It was then I had a strange sense of not quite belonging, of being in a place I knew intimately and not at all.
About 20 of the two dozen homes along the road, each built on a lot of about an acre, were there when I grew up. I remember each house, who lived there, and whether we were on good terms. The Sullivans. The Flemings. The Euchners. The Phillipses. The Pattersons. The Janowiaks. The O’Donnells, Everharts, Ihles, Keetons, and Hartmanns. A parent committed suicide in one house. Another was home to a family that lost both a mother and a brother to untimely deaths. And without looking too hard, one might find equally dark and disturbing stories up and down the road.
Looking across one section of open yards, I saw a light in the back room of a house I knew well–the home of my best friend growing up out there. That lamp looked like it might have been the same one that was shining there on my last visit, about 30 years ago. It might be. My friend’s parents are still there. But all of those other people I remember are long since gone.
I got down to the bottom of the road, then turned around and started back up. A car turned into the road and passed me. I wondered what the driver was thinking. Probably some variation on, “What’s somebody doing out here in the snow this late at night?” I realized my imagined answer to such a question–“I grew up out here”–wouldn’t explain much. What most people would see was a middle-aged guy walking in a dark, cold place the week before Christmas.
I watched the car turn into a driveway, then listened to the loud crunch of gravel under the tires. It occurred to me the driver might not have seen me at all. Maybe I’d been invisible. A ghost visiting his memories.
A week before Christmas, while I was visiting family in Chicago and environs, I drove out to the south suburbs to see two old friends, Jane and Mort. They were teachers at my high school, Crete-Monee. Mort taught English and writing, and we formed a lasting bond over that. I became friends with Jane when she married Mort. We’ve stayed in close enough touch that I still try to drop in once in a while, and I’ve never forgotten their phone number. For the afternoon and evening I was at their house in Crete last month, we talked up a storm, lit the last of the Hanukkah candles, and ate pizza. By the time I left to drive back to the North Side, a weak, intermittent snow was falling. I gassed up in University Park, which I still think of as Park Forest South or even Wood Hill, then drove west on Exchange and north on Monee Road toward our old house.
I parked first down near the bridge over Thorn Creek, at the intersection with Monee and Stuenkel roads. That’s the picture above. I remember that corner during a heavy pre-Christmas snowstorm one night when I was 16 or so. I think school had let out for the holiday earlier that day, and then it started to snow. One of our friends from the road was coming back from college in Iowa. We roamed the neighborhood–it consisted of a couple short stretches of rural roads–and marveled at how heavy the snow was and how quickly it was piling up. We wound up beneath the lamp on the corner, talking, watching the snow come down through the light, talking some more. Maybe there was some snowball mischief involved.
After I took the picture, I got in the car and started to drive toward Park Forest. But I thought, no, I wanted to go up our old road and see if there was anything to be seen up there.
Oak Hill Drive was a quarter-mile long lane, arrow straight through stands of oak and maple and up a little rise, barely wide enough for two cars. It was gravel when we moved onto the road in 1966, and there was always a swampy, potholed stretch about a third of the way up that seemed immune to all efforts to fix it. Walking up there in the dark, it seemed almost inevitable you’d stumble into one of the muddy ruts. The road was eventually tarred and chipped, then paved at some point.
I drove up to the end, where the road ends in a cul de sac and where our old driveway follows a fence line into the trees. I parked in the turn-around–aware the whole time of what we had always thought when we saw a car come to a stop out there and douse its lights: “Someone’s up to no good.” But I parked anyway, got out of the car, and walked back down the road.
It was then I had a strange sense of not quite belonging, of being in a place I knew intimately and not at all.
About 20 of the two dozen homes along the road, each built on a lot of about an acre, were there when I grew up. I remember each house, who lived there, and whether we were on good terms. The Sullivans. The Flemings. The Euchners. The Phillipses. The Pattersons. The Janowiaks. The O’Donnells, Everharts, Ihles, Keetons, and Hartmanns. A parent committed suicide in one house. Another was home to a family that lost both a mother and a brother to untimely deaths. And without looking too hard, one might find equally dark and disturbing stories up and down the road.
Looking across one section of open yards, I saw a light in the back room of a house I knew well–the home of my best friend growing up out there. That lamp looked like it might have been the same one that was shining there on my last visit, about 30 years ago. It might be. My friend’s parents are still there. But all of those other people I remember are long since gone.
I got down to the bottom of the road, then turned around and started back up. A car turned into the road and passed me. I wondered what the driver was thinking. Probably some variation on, “What’s somebody doing out here in the snow this late at night?” I realized my imagined answer to such a question–“I grew up out here”–wouldn’t explain much. What most people would see was a middle-aged guy walking in a dark, cold place the week before Christmas.
I watched the car turn into a driveway, then listened to the loud crunch of gravel under the tires. It occurred to me the driver might not have seen me at all. Maybe I’d been invisible. A ghost visiting his memories.
The following comes from a 1905 essay by Colonel Sir Thomas Holdridge, a British soldier and geographer, in a book titled, “The Empire and the Century: A series of essays on imperial problems and possibilities by various writers. With an introducton by Charles Sydney Goldman, author of ‘With General French and the Cavalry in South African,’ and a poem by Rudyard Kipling, entitled ‘The Heritage.’ With seven maps.”
Holdrich’s subject: What would happen if the Russians threatened the northwestern frontier of British India (in modern terms, the northwestern border of Pakistan) by way of an attack through Afghanistan. I haven’t found details of his earlier career, but he writes as if he’d served in Afghanistan during earlier British adventures. Here’s a little of what he has to say about the Afghans of his age:
“… It is a matter of history that patriotism, unity of sentiment, and devotion to duty, have hitherto been lamentably deficient in Afghan armies; but if the morale is bad, the material is excellent; and nothing but the utter ineptitude of Afghan leaders prevents the Amir from possessing as efficient a fighting force as any in the East. We do not know, indeed, at the present time what the result of twenty-five years of careful nursing may be. The impulse of religious belief and inborn love of independence may have easily developed something akin to real patriotism. I worked with Afghan troops on the borders of Kafristan in 1895, and I could mark a distinct change, both in sentiment and discipline, which had been effected by fifteen years of peace amongst men of the same clan as those who had formed my escort in Herat in 1856, or who had acted as friendly guides in 1879. The metier of the Afghan is that of the irregular marksman. He is often a splendid shot, and no European troops could ever hope to compete with Ghilzai or Hazara mountaineers amongst their own hills in a defensive campaign. Ten thousand Afridis [Pashtuns], it may be remembered (I had special opportunities for estimating their numbers), kept 40,000 British and Indian troops well employed in Tirah, and there is little to choose between the Afridi and his Afghan neighbour. The Amir of Afghanistan could certainly put 200,000 irregular riflemen (armed with modern weapons) into the field if he chose to do so, and he has at his command a very efficient force of mounted artillery to support them. In short, it would be a serious mistake for us to imagine that we could make our way to Kabul now with the same comparative ease that we did in 1878. …”
“… At present Afghan troops, however excellent the raw material may be, want discipline, drill, and leading; and that they can only obtain by the importation of instructors from outside Afghanistan. These they will probably get, either in the form of British or Japanese officers, but time will be required for such outsiders to get on good terms with their men, and for the men to understand their instructors. The young British officer is unmatched in the world for his capacity to turn raw material into good fighting stuff; and here probably is foreshadowed the chief difficulty in the solution of the frontier problem. Where are officers to come from ? The supply which a few years ago seemed to be inexhaustible already shows signs of failing. The spirit of unrest and discontent which now pervades the service in India is such as has never before been known, and it is ominous of future difficulty in filling up vacancies which will rapidly occur. Indeed, there are notwanting symptoms on all sides that it is the ranks of the officers, rather than those of the men, that are likely to fail in numbers.”
“Afghanistan, a graveyard of empires. I (hope) that peace will one day shine, but for now I will just pray.”
–Most widely attributed to Mahmud Tarzi, an Afghan nationalist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
President G.W. Bush in Aurora, Missouri, January 14, 2002:
“…I’m proud of the efforts of many all around our country who are working endless hours to make America safe. But the best way to make America safe is to hunt the enemy down where he tries to hide and bring them to justice, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
“I gave our military a mighty task, and they have responded. I want to thank those of you who have got relatives in the military, a brother or a sister, or a son or a daughter, or a mom or a dad. They have made me proud, and I hope they made you proud, as well.
“We sent the military on a clear mission, and that is to bring the evil ones to justice. It’s a mission, however, that I expanded to include this: that if you hide a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, if you provide aid and comfort for a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorist. That’s why the Taliban is no longer ruling Afghanistan.
“I think that one of the most joyous things for me is to see the faces of the Afghan women as they have been liberated from the oppression of the Taliban rule. Not only is our military destroying those who would harbor evil, destroying whatever military they had, destroying their defenses, but we’re liberators. We’re freeing women and children from incredible oppression.
“… The Taliban is in total rout. But we haven’t completed our mission yet. And we’re now at a very dangerous phase of the war in the first theater, and that is sending our boys and troops into the caves. You see, we’re fighting an enemy that’s willing to send others to death, suicide missions in the name of religion, and they, themselves, want to hide in caves.
“But you know something? We’re not going to tire. We’re not going to be impatient. We’re going to do whatever it takes to find them and bring them to justice. They think they can hide, but they’re not going to hide from the mighty reach of the United States and the coalition we have put together. …”
Speech delivered in the warehouse of the MFA Food Mill. Full text here.
So I tried out a presidential quote on my Facebook friends to see if they could guess who said it. The person in question described himself at one stage in his life as “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.” I was a little surprised how quickly–immediately–someone came back with the correct answer: Lincoln.
So I brainstormed another favorite presidential quote: “The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.” That’s another well-known one: U.S. Grant near the end of his struggle with throat cancer.
On one hand, I’ve always thought Grant was saying that illness and suffering were sublimating his presence as a person into something else: a verb, an action, an energized presence. And I think it’s natural to focus on the last part of the formulation: “to suffer.” By all accounts he was in a lot of pain as his cancer progressed. But there’s something else there that perhaps shouldn’t be surprising for someone who was as careful a writer as Grant was. In part, he’s quoting what may have been a childhood grammar lesson.
Here’s a passage from an 1831 volume by John March Putnam, “English Grammar: with an improved syntax.” It’s a pretty standard late 18th-early 19th century description of verbs and their function.
I think Grant’s sublimation is still there. But his “suffering” has another dimension to it–simultaneously, he exists still, he continues to act, and he is at the mercy of the forces ending his life.
