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Madville Publishing - Sam Pickering

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92 pages

English

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Familiar essays by Sam Pickering, who has written more than thirty books and barrows of articles. When not at his desk, he was in the classroom, the last thirty-five years teaching English at the University of Connecticut.

Sujets

CNF

Form

Humor

Essays

Informations

Publié par	Madville Publishing
Date de parution	21 juin 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781956440119
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Other Books by Sam Pickering
Essay Collections
A Continuing Education
The Right Distance
May Days
Still Life
Let It Ride
Trespassing
The Blue Caterpillar
Living to Prowl
Deprived of Unhappiness
A Little Fling
The Last Book
The Best of Pickering
Indian Summer
Autumn Spring
Journeys
Dreamtime
The Splendour Falls
All My Days Are Saturdays
Happy Vagrancy
One Grand, Sweet Song
Parade’s End
The World Was My Garden, Too
Terrible Sanity
Travel
Walkabout Year
Waltzing the Magpies
Edinburgh Days
A Tramp’s Wallet
Literary Studies
The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850
John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England
Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749-1820
Teaching
Letters to a Teacher
Memoir
A Comfortable Boy

Copyright © 2022 by Sam Pickering
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
Madville Publishing
P.O. Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Author Photograph: Edward Pickering
Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis
Cover image: “The Dreamer” at the Ruins of Oybin, by Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1835. Oil on canvas. Accessed via Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_011.jpg , 6/28/2021.
ISBN: 978-1-956440-10-2 Paperback,
ISBN: 978-1-956440-11-9 Ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937346
For Vicki or, as she is sometimes known, Nurse Victoria
Table of Contents
Introduction
Time on My Legs
A Tangle
8:00 in the Morning
The Old Oaken Bucket
Likeness
Radioactive
Everything
Solstice Sunshine
Notes
Endings
About the Author
Introduction
“In these days of almost universal insomnia any attempt to mitigate the sorrows of the sleepless cannot fail to deserve, if it does not obtain, the warmest possible welcome,” Harry Graham stated in the preface to The Bolster Book (1910). “No apology therefore is necessary for the publication of a volume primarily designed to minister to the needs of all who are strangers to the arms of Morpheus. In the compilation of this Book for the Bedside, as I have ventured to call it, one single object has been resolutely kept in view. Every chapter has been chosen solely on its merits as an aid to slumber; every page, by reason of its irrelevance and discursiveness, is a natural soporific; every paragraph is calculated to induce sleep.” Graham’s goal is beyond my reach, indeed beyond the dream of every writer I know. No matter how resolute my intent and how verbs hobnail my thoughts, I sometimes slip. I lose my grip on meaninglessness and fall downhill, soiling sentences in the low ground of significance and shredding delight amid the stony till of high seriousness. It is difficult, however, to resist wondering about important matters, for example, snowflakes that burst into flame when they touch the ground then burn so intensely they heat the sky and melt future snows, turning them into rain.
Of course what one person deems important strikes another as insignificant. For me ostensibly ignorable doings are more memorable than television and newspaper happenings. Amid the small, life flourishes. On Saturday Vicki and I drove to the McDonald’s in Willimantic. There Vicki bought a birthday treat for the dogs, a McDouble to be shared by Suzie who is at least fifteen, Jack who is probably fourteen, and Mia who might be thirteen or sixteen. That night after removing the pickles and onions, Vicki stuck three small colored candles into the bun. She then handed me the burger, lit the candles, and photographed me while I held the treat and the dogs cavorted at my feet. “A Happy Birthday like those we celebrated when the children were little,” Vicki said blowing out the candles and slicing the cake. “Our grand good life,” I said. “Much has been taken, but ‘much abides.’ Let us hope that we don’t become too withered and world weary to notice and appreciate.”
Inconsistency is both the strength and weakness of the essay. Inconsistency reveals that a person is alive, shifting and moving, both breaking free from and embracing orthodoxy. Moods change like the seasons. One moment thoughts are overcast and rainy, the next sunny, the sky a blue porcelain bowl, white shadows nicking it here and there. In this book I look at things from different perspectives: inside and out, top and bottom. I find answers on one page. On the next page they become questions. Like the hero of the novel as T. H. Green described him, indeed like life itself, the essay is the sport of fortune, its weal or woe often depending on “the impression of outward things.” Throughout these essays I enjoy myself although some things I describe are grim. Obliquely Harry Graham points the way, or at least I think he does. The cultural vertigo created by spinning platitudes about like tops delights him. The first stanza of “Virtue is Its Own Reward” asks, “Virtue its own reward? Alas! / And what a poor one as a rule! / Be Virtuous and Life will pass / Like one long term at Sunday-School. / (No prospect, truly, could one find / More unalluring to the mind.)”
Because essayists yearn to appear fresh and because “choral conversation” is boring, they celebrate originality. “We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease to think at all, and follow the fashion of thought as servilely as we follow the fashion in hats,” A. G. Gardiner wrote. Not unexpectedly Gardiner criticized education for forcing conformity. “We standardize our children. We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching them to be themselves—new incantations of the human spirit, new prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world. We are more concerned about putting our thought into their heads than in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom.” How could responsible parents behave otherwise? People are herd animals. Occasionally, someone kicks the rails, tosses his reins, and races away in what at first appears a gallop but what time eventually reveals to be a slow trot. Chesterton once wrote that there were two types of people, “those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.” Chesterton was wrong. All people accept dogmas and know it. Some people feign ignorance or pretend innocence while others refuse to acknowledge their conformity. Often the latter vociferously assert their independence, and in order to assuage their pride, stage displays for themselves or for others in hopes of creating fictional public, often political, personae.
Although Thoreau changed his wardrobe and tailor when he camped beside Walden Pond, he was, Leslie Stephen wrote, incapable of altering the tenor of his thought and still lived “in the atmosphere of Cambridge debating rooms.” “Far from being a true child of nature,” Stephen stated, “he is a man of theories, a product of the social state against which he tried to revolt. He does not so much relish the wilderness as to go out into wilderness to rebuke his contemporaries.” The devotion of Thoreau’s disciples is often weedy and scratchy. But short of wandering the outdoors wearing jackets with uncountable numbers of pockets, combat boots, clothes not sewn by bespoke tailors, and bent under picks and shovels, test tubes, microscopes, hand lenses, a library of field guides, headlamps for the dark, bags for snakes, boxes for insects—all of which I have worn and carried—how does one become, not a child of nature, but escape the evanescent demandings of the self and become immersed in natural things seemingly beyond the ego? The person devoted to awakening appreciation and love for the natural world almost always reacts to or in concert with his contemporaries, be they books or people. In these essays I write signatures of pages about the outdoors. My Nature is, however, one of words, objects sketched into being by vowels and consonants. A local Leslie Stephen once admonished me saying my fondness for flowers and trees, birds, and the often overlooked crawling generations was admirable, but words were my real love. “For you affection begins with word at first sight.”
In Stray Feathers from Many Birds Charles Dixon said, “the sermons preached by Nature in her lovely temple are full of beauty and simplicity; each of us is welcome there, the seats are free.” Preaching comes easily to me. However, believing that congregants pay other than late-night, armchair attention requires a degree of hubris of which I am not yet capable. For my part, though, I cannot resist Ebenezer Elliot’s secular homily, “To the Bramble Flower.” “For dull the eye, the heart is dull,” Elliot wrote, that cannot appreciate the beauty of the bramble’s “tender blossoms.” After the passage of years and brighter flowers ceased quickening remembrance, sight of the wild bramble, Elliot said, evoked “The fresh green days of life’s fair spring / And boyhood’s bloss’my hour.” “Scorn’d bramble of the brake!” he exclaimed, “Once more / Thou bidd’s me be a boy / To gad with thee the woodlands o’er, / In freedom and in joy.” Today blackberries and raspberries grow year-round in groceries, in Price Chopper on the same counter as blueberries and strawberries. Once they were summertime rarities and grew in abandoned pastures or along the shoulders of less-traveled roads. They were country treats plucked by children and brought home in woven basswood baskets. They were not a “Product of Mexico” packaged in plastic containers each containing six ounces, special only when sold “Two for the Price of One.” When I was afield gadding about, I always picked more berries than my family could eat. Mixed among them were worms and green stink bugs seasoning taste and conversation. Briars ripped my hands and arms, and after picking, my clothes were ratty and bloody. In fact the more blood the greater m