A break from Shakespeare: "Little House in the Big Woods", "Catcher in the Rye", "Pigeon Feathers"
I'm still struggling through the histories. I haven't actually checked, but it feels like they are much longer than the tragedies and comedies I was reading before. Those, it felt like, only took a couple of hours to read with their footnotes, while I can sit for six hours with one of the Henries and only be partially through it.
But I'm more than halfway through them. I'm on Henry VI part 2, and there are only three left after this.
In the meantime, I finally took a break to read something else. Specifically, "Little House in the Big Woods", by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the first of the books in the series which includes "Little House on the Prairie". I read all of these books in elementary school and loved them, but I haven't thought of re-reading them until one of the hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest mentioned re-reading them last week. And I recalled that the book had given me a lot of comfort during a morbid death-obsessed period in my childhood, so perhaps it would be comforting now, with a long-time friend of mine having died two weeks ago.
As promised on that podcast, I saw the books from a much different perspective as an adult. There were the little things, like noticing a song about "darkies" that I don't recall from my childhood (either I didn't understand it as an 8 year old, or it was redacted from the version I read), and being able to actually look up what things like "salt rising bread" are on Wikipedia. I also had more awareness of the historical context of the books. As a child reading them, I imagined that their situation was typical of the past, that all the modern structure of civilization hadn't been invented yet and so everyone lived in isolated log cabins, making their own sugar, soap, cheese, straw hats, and everything else, from scratch. Now, having read a lot of Victorian literature and, for that matter, Shakespeare, I realize this was a product of their place, not their time. This is even alluded to in the book; there is a town, where other children live, but Laura just had never been there. Laura's mother had lived back east and so had a fine store-made dress she'd brought with her. And there was Pa's fiddle, and the threshing machine, and other products of more refined manufacturing. The reason it all seems so timeless and normal is because it's told from the perspective of 6-year-old Laura, and to a young child the way the world is now, is the way it always has been, should be, and will be.
There were also a few moments where I felt the presence of the 60-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder, writing those words. This is especially true in the ending passage of the book. 6-year-old Laura hears her Pa sing "Auld Lang Syne" accompanied by his fiddle:
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, "This is now."
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten [like the days of auld lang syne], she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
This of course contrasts ironically with the first sentence of the book, which begins, "Once upon a time, sixty years ago...", but it becomes more poignant when you reflect that it's Laura, the author, reflecting on how her own childhood is sixty years in the past. It reminds me of a thought I still remember from when I was in pre-school, longing to be one of the big kids in elementary school. Despite what the grown-ups told me, I never seemed to get any older, I was always a little kid as long as I could remember. I concluded that some people are grown-ups, and some people are big kids, and some people are little kids, and you'll always be where you are.
Perhaps it was that memory that gave me such a poignant awareness of the inevitable passage of time, when I was still in elementary school. I read "Little House in the Big Woods" during when I was probably 8 or 10 years old, during what I recall as the morbid period of my childhood. For some reason, around that age I became obsessed with my fear of death. I don't remember any specific event that precipitated this, no one I was close to died around that period. Instead, it seems I just became aware of the likelihood that there was no afterlife, and this thought, plus the logical fact that I would inevitably die some day, terrified me. It was combined with a terrible fear of the infinite, and the eternal, and the end of the world. I learned that "someday" (billions of years in the future) the sun would go supernova, destroying the Earth. This became my only recurring nightmare. Frequently I would wake up to the roar of planes flying overhead and wonder if it was the roar of the sun going nova ahead of schedule.
In my own internal history of my self, it feels like I reshaped the structure of my thoughts during this period. Whenever my mind was idle, it would fixate on thoughts of death, or, perhaps worse, an afterlife composed of eternal sensory deprivation in a white or black featureless void. So I began distracting myself constantly. I had done the mid-childhood switch from baths to showers by this age; I switched back to baths so that I could read with one hand while washing and thus distract myself from the cold echoing whiteness of the bathroom, the microcosm and inspiration of that feared void. I always had a book in hand, or I was watching TV, or I was using the computer. Nights were difficult, because sleep felt like a miniature death. I kept a stack of MAD magazines and paperbacks my bed, and every night I would try to read them until I was so tired I would fall asleep immediately upon putting it down, or better yet, just pass out while holding the magazine.
Gradually my fear of death faded, though I still had occasional flare-ups until I went on antidepressants in my late 20s. I wrote about the peace I've made with death in this very LiveJournal way back in 2004, two days after the Boxing Day tsunami, so I won't go into it here. I guess in addition to the mental equation I laid out there (that life is better if you don't waste it fearing death), I can also credit the subsidence of my fear death to just overall better mental control as I get older, and a better sense of perspective. When I was a child, who had gained logical awareness of the fact that I would die "someday", I had no perspective to really separate that future "someday" from the here and now. If it would happen, ever, it felt just as scary as if it were happening immediately. Now, well, I have a better sense of perspective. And I suppose, beyond that, I find that my fear of death, like many of the drives of my youth, has faded and mellowed a bit through the years. But the thought patterns from that time have stuck with me, the craving for constant distraction, fear that stillness will lead to thoughts of death. Recently I've started meditating, and tried to become more comfortable with mental stillness. I've realized that my period on antidepressants apparently has killed those intrusive thoughts, and now I can have an empty mind and feel fine.
The point of this digression was to say that "Little House in the Big Woods", and the whole "Little House" series, were immensely comforting to me during that period of my childhood. The rest of the time, it felt like death had invaded the world, that it was everywhere, all-pervading, a darkness hiding behind the facade of reality. The Little House books felt like a refuge from that somehow, a solid, safe place where death couldn't invade. Reading them now, even as an adult I feel some of that same feeling. It's funny because in the book, because the people in the book are actually living in precarious and dangerous times. In the first book alone, there are multiple encounters with deadly wildlife, and references to the possibility of starvation if the crops fail. But despite the precarious situation, the people in the Little House books carry through stolidly and optimistically, striving to be hard-working and cheerful, even though they don't always live up to this.
Anyway, reading the Little House books, and then thinking about my childhood morbid phase, reminded me of a short story I read which perfectly captured this period of my life, "Pigeon Feathers" by John Updike. It used to feel like I was the only person who'd spent their childhood obsessed with an intellectual fear of death, until I stumbled across this story when I was 19 or so. It's about a boy who one day reads an atheist account of Jesus's life in H.G. Wells's "The Outline of History". The realization that someone as intelligent as H.G. Wells could have been an atheist shatters his faith in God, and thus in Heaven, and leads him to be similarly obsessed with death and craving constant distraction. (But there are some differences. He's 13 instead of 8. He's a lifelong Christian who eventually regains his belief in God; I'm a lifelong atheist/agnostic.) Some of the passages describe very accurately how I felt, like this one where he ponders an eternity of sensory deprivation, and then feels a physical repulsion at the thought of death:
Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.
Sweat broke out on his back. His mind seemed to rebound off a solidness. Such extinction was not another threat, a graver sort of danger, a kind of pain; it was qualitatively different. It was not even a conception that could be voluntarily pictured; it entered him from outside. His protesting nerves swarmed on its surface like lichen on a meteor. The skin of his chest was soaked with the effort of rejection. At the same time that the fear was dense and internal, it was dense and all around him; a tide of clay had swept up to the stars; space was crushed into a mass.
Then the parts where he seeks distraction, and where casual jokes about death throw him off. (When I was a kid, there was an episode of "The Golden Girls" where Rose has a near-death experience and the girls discuss the afterlife, which terrified me.)
... he tried to drown his hopelessness in clatter and jostle. The pinball machine at the luncheonette was a merciful distraction; as he bent over its buzzing, flashing board of flippers and cushions, the weight and constriction in his chest lightened and loosened. He was grateful for all the time his father wasted in [town]. Every delay postponed the moment when they must ride together down the dirt road into the heart of the dark farmland, where the only light was the kerosene lamp waiting on the dining-room table, a light that drowned their food in shadow and made it sinister.
He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being ambushed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction immensities of space and time conspired to annihilate the human beings; and even in P. G. Wodehous there was a threat, a bland mockery that acquired bite in the comic figures of futile clergymen. All gaiety seemed minced out on the skin of a void. All quiet hours seemed invitations to dread.
Re-reading this story, I felt pretty much the same as the first time I read it around age 19. Out of curiosity, I looked up the text of H. G. Wells's "The Outline of History" online, and was surprised to find it doesn't really match the story. In the story, it's described like this:
Then, before he could halt his eyes, David slipped into Wells's account of Jesus. He had been an obscure political agitator, a kind of hobo, in a minor colony of the Roman Empire. By an accident impossible to reconstruct, he (the small h horrified David) survived his own crucifixion and presumably died a few weeks later. A religion was founded on the freakish incident. The credulous imagination of the times retrospectively assigned miracles and supernatural pretensions to Jesus; a myth grew, and then a church, whose theology at most points was in direct contradiction of the simple, rather communistic teachers of the Galilean.
This theory that Christianity is based on Jesus surviving his crucifixion by an accident was so strange I wanted to read it myself. To my surprise, I found it nowhere in "The Outline of History". Admittedly, it's a 1,000-page book and I didn't read the whole thing, but I read the full sections about Jesus, and I searched the text for all occurrences of the words "Jesus" and "survive" and the word fragment "crucifi", and found no reference to this. Wells later released a shorter version of the world's history, called "A Short History of the World", so I checked this as well, but it's not in there either. The rest of the description is fairly accurate. Wells explicitly gives his intent to focus on the undeniable physical history of Jesus, leaving the question of his divinity up to the reader. Then he focuses on a philosophy of universal love for its own sake, seen in Jesus's own words and actions, and goes on to describe the church adding more layers of mysticism and ritual to this philosophy to become the modern day religion.
But no where in there does he put forth the theory that the stories of the resurrection were inspired by Jesus's accidental physicaly survival of the crucifixion. It makes me wonder where John Updike got that detail from. Was it in some other edition of "The Outline of History" than the one available online? Is he confusing that book with another one that he read years earlier? Google has no answers for me here.
Anyway, this entry has become longer than I initially intended. I've also started re-reading "The Catcher in the Rye", because Angie checked it out from the library, having never read it herself. I'd heard, in another Slate podcast, the theory that the book is, in fact, about grieving, because Holden's younger brother Allie has died sometime shortly before the book, and this in part explains Holden's dissatisfaction with everything. So, I was interested in reading this book again as well. I've only read it once before, during my freshman year of college when I was 18 years old (Holden is 16 during the action of the book, 17 when he narrates the book). At that time, I found the book mostly flat and uninteresting, the language sounding stilted and unnatural with its bizarre mix of informality and 10-dollar words. What I mostly got out of it was identification with a kind of late adolescence feeling of a swift declining in my opportunities, of the world as a place where doors are constantly closing on me.
Now, I'm about 10% of the way into the book, and, ironically, I find I'm appreciating it a lot more than when I was close to Holden's age. The language which was a barrier to it before, is no longer a problem now that I'm used to reading things as alien as Shakespeare. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how his voice is supposed to sound, although it does seem to flow better if I imagine him with a New York accent.
But I'm more than halfway through them. I'm on Henry VI part 2, and there are only three left after this.
In the meantime, I finally took a break to read something else. Specifically, "Little House in the Big Woods", by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the first of the books in the series which includes "Little House on the Prairie". I read all of these books in elementary school and loved them, but I haven't thought of re-reading them until one of the hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest mentioned re-reading them last week. And I recalled that the book had given me a lot of comfort during a morbid death-obsessed period in my childhood, so perhaps it would be comforting now, with a long-time friend of mine having died two weeks ago.
As promised on that podcast, I saw the books from a much different perspective as an adult. There were the little things, like noticing a song about "darkies" that I don't recall from my childhood (either I didn't understand it as an 8 year old, or it was redacted from the version I read), and being able to actually look up what things like "salt rising bread" are on Wikipedia. I also had more awareness of the historical context of the books. As a child reading them, I imagined that their situation was typical of the past, that all the modern structure of civilization hadn't been invented yet and so everyone lived in isolated log cabins, making their own sugar, soap, cheese, straw hats, and everything else, from scratch. Now, having read a lot of Victorian literature and, for that matter, Shakespeare, I realize this was a product of their place, not their time. This is even alluded to in the book; there is a town, where other children live, but Laura just had never been there. Laura's mother had lived back east and so had a fine store-made dress she'd brought with her. And there was Pa's fiddle, and the threshing machine, and other products of more refined manufacturing. The reason it all seems so timeless and normal is because it's told from the perspective of 6-year-old Laura, and to a young child the way the world is now, is the way it always has been, should be, and will be.
There were also a few moments where I felt the presence of the 60-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder, writing those words. This is especially true in the ending passage of the book. 6-year-old Laura hears her Pa sing "Auld Lang Syne" accompanied by his fiddle:
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, "This is now."
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten [like the days of auld lang syne], she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
This of course contrasts ironically with the first sentence of the book, which begins, "Once upon a time, sixty years ago...", but it becomes more poignant when you reflect that it's Laura, the author, reflecting on how her own childhood is sixty years in the past. It reminds me of a thought I still remember from when I was in pre-school, longing to be one of the big kids in elementary school. Despite what the grown-ups told me, I never seemed to get any older, I was always a little kid as long as I could remember. I concluded that some people are grown-ups, and some people are big kids, and some people are little kids, and you'll always be where you are.
Perhaps it was that memory that gave me such a poignant awareness of the inevitable passage of time, when I was still in elementary school. I read "Little House in the Big Woods" during when I was probably 8 or 10 years old, during what I recall as the morbid period of my childhood. For some reason, around that age I became obsessed with my fear of death. I don't remember any specific event that precipitated this, no one I was close to died around that period. Instead, it seems I just became aware of the likelihood that there was no afterlife, and this thought, plus the logical fact that I would inevitably die some day, terrified me. It was combined with a terrible fear of the infinite, and the eternal, and the end of the world. I learned that "someday" (billions of years in the future) the sun would go supernova, destroying the Earth. This became my only recurring nightmare. Frequently I would wake up to the roar of planes flying overhead and wonder if it was the roar of the sun going nova ahead of schedule.
In my own internal history of my self, it feels like I reshaped the structure of my thoughts during this period. Whenever my mind was idle, it would fixate on thoughts of death, or, perhaps worse, an afterlife composed of eternal sensory deprivation in a white or black featureless void. So I began distracting myself constantly. I had done the mid-childhood switch from baths to showers by this age; I switched back to baths so that I could read with one hand while washing and thus distract myself from the cold echoing whiteness of the bathroom, the microcosm and inspiration of that feared void. I always had a book in hand, or I was watching TV, or I was using the computer. Nights were difficult, because sleep felt like a miniature death. I kept a stack of MAD magazines and paperbacks my bed, and every night I would try to read them until I was so tired I would fall asleep immediately upon putting it down, or better yet, just pass out while holding the magazine.
Gradually my fear of death faded, though I still had occasional flare-ups until I went on antidepressants in my late 20s. I wrote about the peace I've made with death in this very LiveJournal way back in 2004, two days after the Boxing Day tsunami, so I won't go into it here. I guess in addition to the mental equation I laid out there (that life is better if you don't waste it fearing death), I can also credit the subsidence of my fear death to just overall better mental control as I get older, and a better sense of perspective. When I was a child, who had gained logical awareness of the fact that I would die "someday", I had no perspective to really separate that future "someday" from the here and now. If it would happen, ever, it felt just as scary as if it were happening immediately. Now, well, I have a better sense of perspective. And I suppose, beyond that, I find that my fear of death, like many of the drives of my youth, has faded and mellowed a bit through the years. But the thought patterns from that time have stuck with me, the craving for constant distraction, fear that stillness will lead to thoughts of death. Recently I've started meditating, and tried to become more comfortable with mental stillness. I've realized that my period on antidepressants apparently has killed those intrusive thoughts, and now I can have an empty mind and feel fine.
The point of this digression was to say that "Little House in the Big Woods", and the whole "Little House" series, were immensely comforting to me during that period of my childhood. The rest of the time, it felt like death had invaded the world, that it was everywhere, all-pervading, a darkness hiding behind the facade of reality. The Little House books felt like a refuge from that somehow, a solid, safe place where death couldn't invade. Reading them now, even as an adult I feel some of that same feeling. It's funny because in the book, because the people in the book are actually living in precarious and dangerous times. In the first book alone, there are multiple encounters with deadly wildlife, and references to the possibility of starvation if the crops fail. But despite the precarious situation, the people in the Little House books carry through stolidly and optimistically, striving to be hard-working and cheerful, even though they don't always live up to this.
Anyway, reading the Little House books, and then thinking about my childhood morbid phase, reminded me of a short story I read which perfectly captured this period of my life, "Pigeon Feathers" by John Updike. It used to feel like I was the only person who'd spent their childhood obsessed with an intellectual fear of death, until I stumbled across this story when I was 19 or so. It's about a boy who one day reads an atheist account of Jesus's life in H.G. Wells's "The Outline of History". The realization that someone as intelligent as H.G. Wells could have been an atheist shatters his faith in God, and thus in Heaven, and leads him to be similarly obsessed with death and craving constant distraction. (But there are some differences. He's 13 instead of 8. He's a lifelong Christian who eventually regains his belief in God; I'm a lifelong atheist/agnostic.) Some of the passages describe very accurately how I felt, like this one where he ponders an eternity of sensory deprivation, and then feels a physical repulsion at the thought of death:
Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.
Sweat broke out on his back. His mind seemed to rebound off a solidness. Such extinction was not another threat, a graver sort of danger, a kind of pain; it was qualitatively different. It was not even a conception that could be voluntarily pictured; it entered him from outside. His protesting nerves swarmed on its surface like lichen on a meteor. The skin of his chest was soaked with the effort of rejection. At the same time that the fear was dense and internal, it was dense and all around him; a tide of clay had swept up to the stars; space was crushed into a mass.
Then the parts where he seeks distraction, and where casual jokes about death throw him off. (When I was a kid, there was an episode of "The Golden Girls" where Rose has a near-death experience and the girls discuss the afterlife, which terrified me.)
... he tried to drown his hopelessness in clatter and jostle. The pinball machine at the luncheonette was a merciful distraction; as he bent over its buzzing, flashing board of flippers and cushions, the weight and constriction in his chest lightened and loosened. He was grateful for all the time his father wasted in [town]. Every delay postponed the moment when they must ride together down the dirt road into the heart of the dark farmland, where the only light was the kerosene lamp waiting on the dining-room table, a light that drowned their food in shadow and made it sinister.
He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being ambushed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction immensities of space and time conspired to annihilate the human beings; and even in P. G. Wodehous there was a threat, a bland mockery that acquired bite in the comic figures of futile clergymen. All gaiety seemed minced out on the skin of a void. All quiet hours seemed invitations to dread.
Re-reading this story, I felt pretty much the same as the first time I read it around age 19. Out of curiosity, I looked up the text of H. G. Wells's "The Outline of History" online, and was surprised to find it doesn't really match the story. In the story, it's described like this:
Then, before he could halt his eyes, David slipped into Wells's account of Jesus. He had been an obscure political agitator, a kind of hobo, in a minor colony of the Roman Empire. By an accident impossible to reconstruct, he (the small h horrified David) survived his own crucifixion and presumably died a few weeks later. A religion was founded on the freakish incident. The credulous imagination of the times retrospectively assigned miracles and supernatural pretensions to Jesus; a myth grew, and then a church, whose theology at most points was in direct contradiction of the simple, rather communistic teachers of the Galilean.
This theory that Christianity is based on Jesus surviving his crucifixion by an accident was so strange I wanted to read it myself. To my surprise, I found it nowhere in "The Outline of History". Admittedly, it's a 1,000-page book and I didn't read the whole thing, but I read the full sections about Jesus, and I searched the text for all occurrences of the words "Jesus" and "survive" and the word fragment "crucifi", and found no reference to this. Wells later released a shorter version of the world's history, called "A Short History of the World", so I checked this as well, but it's not in there either. The rest of the description is fairly accurate. Wells explicitly gives his intent to focus on the undeniable physical history of Jesus, leaving the question of his divinity up to the reader. Then he focuses on a philosophy of universal love for its own sake, seen in Jesus's own words and actions, and goes on to describe the church adding more layers of mysticism and ritual to this philosophy to become the modern day religion.
But no where in there does he put forth the theory that the stories of the resurrection were inspired by Jesus's accidental physicaly survival of the crucifixion. It makes me wonder where John Updike got that detail from. Was it in some other edition of "The Outline of History" than the one available online? Is he confusing that book with another one that he read years earlier? Google has no answers for me here.
Anyway, this entry has become longer than I initially intended. I've also started re-reading "The Catcher in the Rye", because Angie checked it out from the library, having never read it herself. I'd heard, in another Slate podcast, the theory that the book is, in fact, about grieving, because Holden's younger brother Allie has died sometime shortly before the book, and this in part explains Holden's dissatisfaction with everything. So, I was interested in reading this book again as well. I've only read it once before, during my freshman year of college when I was 18 years old (Holden is 16 during the action of the book, 17 when he narrates the book). At that time, I found the book mostly flat and uninteresting, the language sounding stilted and unnatural with its bizarre mix of informality and 10-dollar words. What I mostly got out of it was identification with a kind of late adolescence feeling of a swift declining in my opportunities, of the world as a place where doors are constantly closing on me.
Now, I'm about 10% of the way into the book, and, ironically, I find I'm appreciating it a lot more than when I was close to Holden's age. The language which was a barrier to it before, is no longer a problem now that I'm used to reading things as alien as Shakespeare. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how his voice is supposed to sound, although it does seem to flow better if I imagine him with a New York accent.