Another Account of the Same Events

So, it turns out my wife's account, as the only eyewitness to the events narrated in my previous post, is much more entertaining than mine. Accordingly, here it is (reposted by permission)

The Littlest Rabbit's Guardian Scholar:

Look, it's a tiny bunny! Oh My God a ferret's chasing it. The ferret's caught the baby bunny! Whatever you do when you've caught up to them don't get bit. Oh good, when John dashed up the hill at them the ferret and bunny separated and ran in opposite directions. Look, there's a crow over in the direction the bunny went. What's he doing? Oh My God! At least this time John's dashing sideways across the hill to the rescue. The crow's flown off and an exhausted Littlest Rabbit has made it safely under cover. And, best of all, John's intact.

Contact with Nature (Astoria)

So, as of today I'm off on another trip -- this time to Astoria, on the Oregon side of the mouth of the Columbia River. Beautiful little town, full of interesting buildings and businesses, and v. walkable. But the most unusual thing that happened today was my rescuing a rabbit from a ferret.

It happened like this: we were walking up the long, long slope to the top of Coxcomb Hill (600 feet) when we saw something dark explode out of the tall grass to one side. It rolled over and over, making frantic little noises. Going closer, we saw that it was a tiny little rabbit being attacked by a weasel or ferret. Both animals were small and black. I ran up and waved my hat about and shouted until the two separated and I was able to interpose myself enough to shoo off the ferret, which after some hesitation ran back off into the tall grass on the right from whence it had come. The little rabbit ran off in the opposite direction.  Good deed for the day done (at least from the rabbit's point of view; not so much, I suppose, for the hungry ferret).

Or so you'd have thought. I'd no sooner got my breath back and we'd started climbing the hill again than a crow over at the other end started swooping at something. I've read WATERSHIP DOWN* and so know all about crows sometimes attacking small rabbits, esp. possibly wounded ones, so I made a second and longer run (luckily this time without having to go up-slope) till I got close enough to shoo the crow away as well**.  That just left the little rabbit, who still seemed essentially unhurt. It ran about halfway to the tall grass on the left side of the slope, hundreds of feet from where it'd originally been, and flopped over on its side, seemingly exhausted. I hovered over it till it got its breath a little, then when I moved closer it got to its feet and hopped the last little bit to get undercover to safety.

And there I left it, having done all I could do. I hope it was able to rest and recover, and that nothing more was wrong with it than sheer exhaustion for having had to run for its life. It'd certainly fought hard against the weasel/ferret, and I'm glad I was able to give it a helping hand.

From there it was on up to the top of the hill, to walking around and admire the Astoria Column (modeled on Hadrian's Column, it seems, but with Astoria-themed scenes spiraling around the outside all the way up). Janice climbed the internal spiral stairway all the way to the observation level on the top; I was not able to (acrophobia) but enjoyed the view from the hill and the mural-like frescos on the outside.


And speaking of nature, I'd had two other incidents within the past few days I'd meant to blog on. The second was our seeing a raccoon in our complex early Sunday afternoon. I never doubted they might be around -- our previous place at Chandler's Bay had both raccoons and possums, who ate the nom we put out for stray cats -- but we'd never seen any sign of them at Bayview,*** and this was a large one too. It froze when it saw us and seemed trapped, with our car between it and where it wanted to be. Luckily when we pulled forward a bit it saw its chance and made its way over towards the nearest greenbelt and safety.

And the first and truly remarkable event was out seeing a sunbow on Saturday. We were out running errands and pulled up to Minkler's, a health-food and organics store opposite the Renton airport. A man was standing outside, holding a baseball cap up in front of his face and facing upwards. As we were about to pass him, Janice stopped and said, "Okay, you've got my curiosity up; what's up?" He explained and pointed, and when we looked up in turn there it was: a sunbow. I've never seen one before, and if you haven't either here's Janice's picture of what it looked like:

file://localhost/Users/jkcoulter/Desktop/Sunbow.jpg

--Except that while this picture gives an idea of what we saw, the real thing was even more striking. For one thing, the area at the center was an unbearably bright dot of light surrounded by white-bright, which all comes out as one smooth white disk. And the area inside was much darker than the surrounding sky outside the ring. The ring itself shimmered with rainbow colors, the yellow on the inside of the ring, then red, then blue.  It was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and it lasted a long time -- a good twenty/thirty minutes later we saw it again from along the banks of the Green River, where we'd gone to get some locally-grown strawberries, and Janice noticed that it was now in some places a double sunbow, fragments of a second ring having formed in several areas around the main one.

Nature: red in tooth and claw, right up among us when we least expect it, and wholly wondrous in its amazing beauty.

--John R.
current reading: PAINTED DEVILS by Rbt Aickman [?1979] -- the first book I've ever successfully inter-library-loaned through the King Co. Library system.
















*a masterpiece!

**another time I'd have bought it off with peanuts, but I'd forgotten to bring any with me

***Janice adds: I've seen them -- a mother and three little ones -- one night while you were gaming.

Pound, on the War

So long as I'm talking about the Great War, thought the following passages by Ezra Pound give an eloquent evocation of the loss and waste of so much talent:


THE CANTOS, from Canto XVI (1930)

. . . And Henri Gaudier went to it
   and they killed him
And killed a good deal of sculpture

And ole T.E.H. went to it*
With a lot of books from the library
London Library
   And a shell buried him in a dug-out
The Library expressed its annoyance

And a bullet hit him on the elbow
gone through the fellow in front of him
And he read Kant in the Hospital in Wimbleton
   in the original
And the hospital staff didn't like it.

And Wyndham Lewis went to it
With a heavy bit of artillery,
   and the airmen came by . . . 
And cleaned out most of his company,
   and a shell lit on his tin hut
While he was out in the privy
   and he was all that was left of that outfit

. . . and Ernie Hemingway went to it
   too much in a hurry
And they buried him for four days

. . . Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000




 And again, from HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY (1920)

These fought in any case
and some believing . . . 
Some quick to arm

some for adventure
some from fear of weakness
some from fear of censure
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . . 
some in fear, learning love of slaughter

Died some, pro patria
   neither dulce nor et decor**
walked eye-deep in hell
believing old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie
home to many deceits . . . 
and liars in public places

Daring as never before
wastage as never before
Young blood and high blood
fair cheeks and fine bodies

Fortitude as never before

Frankness as never before

Disillusions as never told in the old days
hysteria, trench confessions
laughter out of dead bellies.


There died a myriad
And of the best among them
For an old [expletive] gone in the teeth.
For a botched civilization . . . 


......................................
*i.e., T. E. Hulme
**this is a reference to the tag-line from Horace, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ("it is sweet and fitting/proper to die for your country"), much-quoted early in the war but now best known through having been taken as the basis for a scathing anti-war poem by Wilfred Owen (d. in the trenches, November 1918)

More, on The War

So, in the comments on my previous post (which comments I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way), David B. made the point about all the talent lost in the War, both those who had already made significant achievements (whose future work we lost) and those who were nipped in the bud, to use seriously what has long since become a cliche: killed so young that they left almost nothing behind.

Of major voices that belong to the first category -- writers of known greatness who died too soon because of the war --  three particularly stand out from my point of view.

First, SAKI. Hector Hugh Munro's mordant wit and cynical hilarity were unique and irreplaceable: think P. G. Wodehouse crossed with Edward Gorey. He's what Evelyn Waugh tried and failed to be. Saki is lucky in one way in that while he died relatively young (mid-forties), he'd long been at the peak of his form and people knew a major voice had been silenced. They've forgotten it since, but that'd have been the same had he lived, given the to and fro of literary reputation and the undervaluing of those who, like Saki, excel mainly in the short story form (cf. Dunsany's fate).

Second, EDWARD THOMAS. I confess I'd never heard of Thomas till introduced to his work by a friend during a 1987 trip to England (the same friend who introduced me to the work of Philip Larkin*) -- a lapse which I count as a failure of our grad. school system. He's remembered today as "the English Frost" (i.e., Rbt Frost), but in his own day he was so admired, and rightly so, that young Frost (who was a good friend of his, by the way, whom he mentored) was known as "the American Thomas".  There are other poets killed in the war, but Brooke and Owen are remembered for capturing the moment (of early idealism and later despair, respectively); I doubt if either wd have had much more to say had he survived. Thomas was different. He was one of the greats, celebrating the quiet joys of English countryside, and his death and that of others like him actually changed the course of English literature, causing the emerging Georgians to be represented only by those minor poets who'd survived the war, thus opening the way to Eliot and Pound's Modernism.

Third, a name not many people have heard ranks in my mind as a major loss: WM. HOPE HODGSON. Hodgson is very much an acquired taste, but he makes the list for me because he wrote what I consider one of the finest fantasy novels ever written (it's in my top-ten list): THE NIGHT LAND. Whether Hodgson would have created any more major works had he survived was problematic -- after 1914 his works show a distinct tapering off as he sought a popular audience. But even if he'd been unable to recapture the level of his earlier works, a long life may have brought more attention to his work, including the early work that contains all his best. Or his early brilliance might have been buried under a flood of lesser stuff, as was the case with Dunsany (who did survive, barely**) or, to pick a non-war writer, Rbt Chambers. Or he might have recouped and gone on to greater heights, as is suggested by one of his last letters from the front, in which he talks about the blistering vistas he plans to incorporate into his work based on the things he's seen.

Of writers in the second category, those who did survive who'd achieved little before the war include Tolkien, of course, but also C. S. Lewis, who at the time he was serious wounded by shrapnel had written only SPIRITS IN BONDAGE (a worthy achievement in itself) and a few fragments like THE QUEST OF BHLERIS and the BOXON juvenalia.  And far too many others, like G. B. Smith left behind even less than this.

Alas.


--JDR


*thanks Ken!

**Dunsany was shot in the head, but this was by his fellow Irish during the rebellion, not German snipers.

Did Tolkien Almost Die in 1923?

So, among the many, many interesting books I saw at Doug's during this past Kalamazoo (hi Doug) were two that, in juxtaposition, caught my eye: a biography and the selected letters of George Gordon. I don't know a lot about G.S.G., other than that he was responsible both for Tolkien's getting his post at Leeds (and thus establishing him within his chosen field) and for JRRT's getting the Oxford professorship five years later (thus putting him at the top of said profession). These past few years I've grown more and more convinced that, in the absence of a major publication of new primary research about JRRT himself, learning more about his teachers, colleagues, students, relatives, and friends is a good way to place him in context. Luckily there's been a string of such pieces: Doug's essays on E. V. Gordon and R. W. Chambers (and his Kalamazoo presentation on Simonne d'Ardenne), David's pieces on less-well-known Inklings (esp. Hugo Dyson), Morton's booklets on Jane Suffield Neave, the Hilary Tolkien booklet, the recent biography of Father Francis, et al.


What I hadn't realized is that there's so much information on GSG (biography, letters) readily available. And, checking the index of said volumes and looking up the Tolkien references, of which there are a few --one in the Life (inconsequential) and four in the Letters (quite interesting). And reading these, I was immediately struck with just how ill Tolkien was when he came down with pneumonia in 1923.

I'd never realized before how close Tolkien came to dying. Looking at the evidence, it seems obvious. So why didn't that simple, and dramatically important, fact not impress itself upon me before? I certainly have always known how deadly pneumonia was in those days, and for long afterwards: my own grandfather died of it in 1949 (age 57), and I myself almost died of double pneumonia as a child. The treatment was more or less to make the person get lots of rest and hope for the best. So why, knowing that Tolkien had been strickened with a usually-fatal disease, didn't it really register?

Part of it seems to be presentation. Carpenter's account of this episode, which he does include, is rather breezy, focusing on the humor of young Tolkien sick in bed while old John Suffield, his Tookish grandfather, was off on a trip around the islands (Carpenter's BIOGRAPHY, p. 106). Scull and Hammond report the facts, but briefly and with detachment:

May 1923  Tolkien catches a severe cold, which turns into pneumonia. 

He is gravely ill, his life in danger; but he will begin to recover by 12 June. 

[Scull/Hammond CHRONOLOGY, p. 121]

and again, a little later on the same page

Late June or July 1923 Once Tolkien has recovered from his illness, 

he and his family travel on holiday

Contrast this with the immediacy of Gordon's letters:

This is sad news about Tolkien -- his illness; but 

E. V. says he's safe now, and pulling through.

(i.e., E. V. Gordon) THE LETTERS OF GEORGE S. GORDON  1902-1942  (p. 164)

It's a strange might-have-been to think of Tolkien, who'd never been a strong or healthy man, succumbing to pneumonia at thirty-one, leaving behind THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, the Turin Lay, Kullervo, two invented languages and I think one invented script, a small portfolio of strange art, and a quantity of odd verse. If any of that had gotten published at all, 'SPRING HARVEST'-like, what a strange and truncated legacy it'd have made. I suppose he'd have been remembered as a disciple of Dunsany's who died young. How grateful I am that he recovered from that near-fatal bout, and lived a good long life, with virtually all the work he's known for falling on this side of that dividing line.

Lucky him. Lucky us.

--John R.

In Arkansas

So, internet access spots few (Country Library, MacDonalds) and far between (opposite sides of town) here in Magnolia, Arkansas. Plus v. busy with family visits. More postings soon, once back to the chilly Pacific Midwest.
--John R.

Ain't It the Truth

Been v. busy lately, finishing up the notes and bibliography for my Kalamazoo paper last week and then doing the same for my Valparaiso paper this week, as well as getting ready for my trip (I'm writing this from the Dallas airport, en route to Arkansas).

So, wanted to seize this opportunity to celebrate the Dallas/Fort Worth airport's being enlightened enough to provide not just free wi-fi but a recharge-your-electronics station nr the gate by making a quick post. Few days ago noticed one of those online slideshows listing things around a theme. This particular theme was "Books People Will Judge You By" if they see you reading them. Boy, did they get that right.

Notice the appearance of Tolkien in Slot #3 of their nine-book series.

Here's the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-losowsky/9-books-that-people-will-judge-you_b_3386107.html

--JDR

current reading: C. S. LEWIS, POETRY, AND THE GREAT WAR by Jn Bremer [2012] (well-written and informative but harshly unsympathetic), THE STORY OF MERIADOC tr. Mildred Leake Day [1988] (no, not fan-fiction about Merry Brandybuck but a little-known Arthurian romance)