Quote of the Day (Francis Petrarch, on How ‘Books Give Utter Delight’)

“I cannot have a sufficiency of books. Indeed, I have more than I should... Books give utter delight: they talk with us... and are bound to us by lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates a longing for another.”—Italian Renaissance poet and humanities scholar Francesco di Petracco, aka Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), Selected Letters, Volume 1, translated by Elaine Fantham (2017)

Photo of the Day: Stations of the Cross, St. Cecilia R.C. Church, Englewood NJ

This Good Friday, my longtime parish, St. Cecilia, conducted a bilingual “Living Stations of the Cross.”

A couple of hundred people followed the solemn procession through the streets surrounding the church.

I took this picture on the steps of the church, where this recent tradition of the Passion narrative began with Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus and the scourging of this man of peace at the hands of Roman soldiers.

It took much preparation involving multiple people for this devotional practice of pageantry and pathos to occur. Congratulations to all the organizers.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Barry Hannah, on Jesus, Who ‘Forgives Our Wretchedness’)

“[A]t the center of all my faith, as at the center of the sadly unvisited Good Book, is a man who also forgives our wretchedness. He was not always strong himself. In the garden of Gethsemane he asked his father to let this cup, the crucifixion, be passed from him. His stumbling under the cross up the Via Dolorosa reminds me always of our own stumbling and crawling, over a mighty rough pathway of words left to us by long-dead writers, toward the good mountain of our deliverance.”— American novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah (1942-2010), “The Maddening Protagonist,” Paste Magazine, Issue 19 (December 2005-January 2006)

The image accompanying this post, Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary (ca. 1514-16), was created by the Italian Renaissance painter and architect Raphael (1483-1520).

Photo of the Day: Donut-Hole Snow Mound, Englewood NJ

We’re almost two weeks into spring, but the mountain of snow and silt from the late February blizzard that my hometown deposited in the greenery of Veterans Park has only dwindled without entirely disappearing. The “mountain” had become a hill, and, at last, just a mound.

Then yesterday, I saw something unusual, which I tried to capture in this photo. At that point early in the day, a large round hole had opened beneath a thin arch of snow overhead.

I peered more closely. I could see drops falling from the arch. Higher temperatures (they reached the high 70s later in the day) would, before long, eliminate that thin white veneer overhead.

And so it proved. This morning, the hole was gone and the snow pile was even more noticeably lower.

Continued above-freezing temperatures, along with rain over the next few days, should eliminate the white stuff at last, leaving only a memory of a storm that for a while left streets impassable and frustrated those of us who had to shovel.

Song Lyric of the Day (‘Eve of Destruction,’ on Returning From ‘Four Days in Space’)

“Ah, you may leave here for four days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace.”—American rock ‘n’ roll songwriter P.F. Sloan (1945-2015), “Eve of Destruction” (1965), performed by Barry McGuire from the album of the same name

NASA’s successful launch of the Artemis II space program—marking America’s return to the moon for the first time in a half century—was rightly celebrated as a resumption of a scientific and technological marvel. 

But I was also struck by the conjunction of events in the above lyrics from Barry McGuire’s compelling protest song of the mid-Sixties, as well as a repetition of that today.

Even as the Gemini missions were taking the space program to another level six decades ago, tensions were rising in the Mideast, as Israel and its Arab neighbors confronted each other over control of water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin—or, as McGuire sang, “You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?/And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'.”

Now, even as so many eyes are lifted to the skies, the focus of so much of the world remains on the Mideast, only this time shifting from the Jordan River to the Strait of Hormuz, where America’s current President is unabashedly engaging in “the poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace.”

Some may wonder if the current war actually represents “the Eve of Destruction.” But how else to interpret the current Oval Office occupant’s threat to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”?

Appreciations: Edward Hoagland, Peerless Essayist With ‘The Reformer’s Impulse,’ R.I.P.

Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary on Henry David Thoreau will, I hope, earn the great New England essayist, nature observer, and commentator on the human condition countless new readers, and/or send others back to his work. As they do so, perhaps they will see how other writers have followed in his path—few as beneficially or as powerfully as the American essayist, travel writer, memoirist, and novelist, Edward Hoagland, who died in late February at age 93.

As an undergrad, I came across his essays as an undergrad and interviewed him for my college newspaper. Ever since then, whenever a magazine (usually Harper’s) came out with a new piece by him, I eagerly snatched it up.

Two anthologies of Hoagland’s nonfiction (The Edward Hoagland Reader and Hoagland On Nature), appearing a quarter century apart, were issued by his publishers at the time. I hope that a comprehensive career retrospective will come within the next year or so. It would be a shame for his idiosyncratic but lyrical voice to die with him, without exposing a new generation of readers to his work.

Hoagland wrote half a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. But the average suburban library is unlikely to hold these on their shelves. (I could find only one, In the Country of the Blind, in my county system of 78 libraries). As for publishers: trying to package or market long fiction can be tricky, and so nonfiction will probably be the realm where most readers will encounter him.

Somehow, in a book sale or, if necessary, Amazon, I’ll have to hunt for this fiction. But his nonfiction will still work for me.

Although his virtues into fiction were not permanently stymied, lack of commercial success and an inability to project a suitable narrative voice propelled Hoagland towards nonfiction in the late 1960s. He worked on his third novel, The Peacock's Tail (1965), set in New York City, he “for five years and it sold 900 copies,” he told me in the 1980 interview, “so if you divide the years into 900 you can figure out now much I worked for how little."

The personal essay beckoned, Hoagland observed, because he had to “tell my own story, and also I have the kind of mind that speaks easily in an essay form, in a direct, preachy tone of voice, I suppose"—in other words, fulfilling what Hoagland termed "the reformer's impulse," or the urge to tell the world how it should be.

Quirky and honest, Hoagland mined for material in multiple aspects of his life: the straitlaced WASP upbringing that provoked his rebellious instincts, Harvard literary mentors Archibald MacLeish and John Berryman, working with animals in a circus, travels to places like British Columbia and Africa, and marital relations.

Dividing the year in his prime between Greenwich Village and Vermont, Hoagland hardly disdained the rich variety of life in cities. “I loved the city like the country — the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook — and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir, Compass Points.

You can’t consider Hoagland’s life and work without keeping in mind his two disabilities: one, stuttering, affecting him most at the beginning of his life, and the other, blindness, in late middle age until his death.

When I met him, at age 48, his stammer was intermittent but protracted. Even knowing of his condition beforehand, I felt for him as he struggled to push the words out. Speech therapy could not eradicate or, it seemed, even ease what he called his “vocal handcuffs” to any degree.

"Since I didn't talk so much I had a dialogue in my own mind,” he told me. “Writing is a kind of dialogue in one's own mind, so it all fitted in, I suppose, with that."

This difficulty lent special urgency to his desire to express himself—or, as he put it in a 1968 Village Voice essay, “The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain,” it "made me a desperate, devoted writer at twenty. I worked like a dog, choosing each word."

One of the painful ironies of American literature in this past quarter century has been that this essayist and novelist, who noted in Tigers and Ice (1999) that “A writer's work is to witness things,” increasingly battled blindness from late middle age onward.

Even his worsening medical condition, however, was a matter of rejuvenated appreciation for nature and physical acceptance. Given a temporary reprieve by successful midlife eye surgery, he returns to Vermont to see “the juncos wintering in the dogwoods, the hungry possum nibbling seeds under the birdfeeder, the startling glory of our skunk’s white web of fur in a shaft of faint moonlight.”

The titles of three late-life essays in Harper’s—“Last Call,” “Curtain Calls,” and “Endgame”—testify to his calm, pantheistic acceptance of death, and the hope that his decomposed body would mix at last with the natural world he had so long loved.

I find it hard to accept that I won’t find new work by this unabashedly independent spirit. But I will continually come back to the rich legacy he left behind, of essays that contained, as he put it in The Tugman’s Passage, "a 'nap' to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and can't be brushed flat."

Quote of the Day (Sir William Watson, on April’s ‘Golden Laughter’)

“April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!”—English poet Sir William Watson (1858-1935), “Song,” in The Poems of Sir William Watson (1936)
 
I had never heard of this poem until last week, when I watched Katharine Hepburn reciting these lines in Without Love (1945), the third of her nine films with Spencer Tracy. I’m not sure who was responsible for including this literary allusion: screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart or Philip Barry, who created the original Broadway play.
 
All of this got me wondering about other instances of poetry used in films. “S.G.,” the creator of the blog “Rhyme and Reason,” had a useful May 2016 post, “My Top Twelve Poems in Movies.” I’d like to add just one more: Joyce Kilmer’s “Rouge Bouquet,” recited movingly by the actor portraying him, Jeffrey Lynn, in this clip from the 1940 movie The Fighting 69^th.