More Burroughs
My third completed book for 2008 is Birds and Poets, the sixth volume of the complete works of John Burroughs, the nature essayist. Again, I enjoyed reading it, and I'm very glad I finally decided to read the complete works, which have been sitting on my shelf largely untouched for more than three decades.
This volume has several essays which touch on how poets have looked at nature, and finishes with two long literary appreciations; one of Emerson, the other of Walt Whitman. Burroughs, I learned, had met Whitman when they both lived in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War.
I can't resist sharing two brief passages. The first is from the essay on Whitman, "The Flight of the Eagle," and which sounds surprisingly modern for coming out in 1877.
In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and spoiled; we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that, speaking literally, no people under the sun consume so much confectionery, so much pastry and cake, or indulge in so many gassy and sugared drinks. The soda-fountain, with its syrups, has got into literature, and furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the double-refined, -- white houses, white china, white marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as possible.
It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read abroad than in his own country....
The second is a discussion of cow maintenance, when Burroughs lived just behind the Capitol, with an acre or more of yard, on which lived his cow, Chloe.
This was during the Arcadian age at the capital, before the easy-going Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had come in, and when the domestic animals were treated with distinguished consideration and granted the freedom of the city. There was a charm of cattle in the street and upon the commons: goats cropped your rosebushes through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch; and pigs dreamed Arcadian dreams under your garden fence, or languidly frescoed it with pigments from the nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's golden age. Your cow, or your goat, or your pig led a vagrant, wandering life, and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees, which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and came home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled yourself where she went or how far she roamed.
Chloe took very naturally to this kind of life. At first I had to go with her a few times and pilot her to the nearest commons, and then left her to her own wit, which never failed her. What adventures she had, what acquaintances she made, how far she wandered, I never knew. I never came across her in my walks or rambles. Indeed, on several occasions I thought I would look her up and see her feeding in national pastures, but I never could find her. There were plenty of cows, but they were all strangers. But punctually, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, her white horns would be seen tossing above the gate and her impatient low be heard. Sometimes, when I turned her forth in the morning, she would pause and apparently consider which way she should go. Should she go toward Kendall Green to-day, or follow the Tiber, or over by the Big Spring, or out around Lincoln Hospital? She seldom reached a conclusion till she had stretched forth her neck and blown a blast on her trumpet that awoke the echoes in the very lantern on the dome of the Capitol. Then, after one or two licks, she would disappear around the corner. Later in the season, when the grass was parched or poor on the commons, and the corn and cabbage tempting in the garden, Chloe was loath to depart in the morning, and her deliberations were longer than ever, and very often I had to aid her in coming to a decision.
CBsIP: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Books and Libraries, and Democracy and Other Papers, James Russell Lowell