“She recognized the foxglove leaves of the riding and knew, more or less, where they were.”
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself.
Joseph Conrad, Youth
Thinking back on them, the countless trips my son and I took up and down this path all merge into one, perhaps because one summer is every summer and every summer is every life. The path runs along the canal for seven miles and the wind blows almost always from the south, so the heading back into the wind is always more difficult than the heading out and in the mornings when we start the ships and boats heading up north seem moving with us like bathtub toys flying flags and leaving large white wakes that wash up on the shore. I remember once a fisherman who was every fisherman with his rumpled shirt falling to his hips and his stolid casting in a stream of water where no fish has ever been caught in my viewing.
We started taking this trip when my son was no bigger than my hip and now he towers over me, lanky and sinewy while I am feeling fits of dizziness and we have never stopped doing this because, I think, we feel it as a moment together in the vast blank loneliness of life. I know that what I have to say is what everyone has to say: that life is evanescent and the blink of a firefly. But the trip is worth taking. It is always the same: the trucks rushing along the highway, the ripples of the herring run, the branches of the shrubs obscuring the way along the road, and always the feeling that in the glorious sun—it is perpetually sunny—the joy of passing up is the same as the joy of passing down.
We bike to the beach where the jetty is perpetually the same—the same riprap rocks leading to the light at the end where the children gather and the lobster pots float—and we dive into the water, always scrotum crushing cold, and we dive beneath the surface. The hot sand, the girls on the beach sunning, the rustle of the surf. It is all a jumble, a moment in time, and there is no time, only the endless present.
I am sitting now on the porch beneath the fan where I always sit this time of year gazing at the green lawn where the roses droop from the rain and the daisies are emerging.
Robert Gerst
Gerst, July 16, 2021
The Friday Reading Group gathered to translate a Basho haiku from the Japanese. “Old pond…new frog…water jump-in sound” is how one translator renders it, but every rendering renews both poem and poet because the poem is the poem of poems. The readers rendered the haiku this way:
There is an old pond/A frog jumps in/spash (Ben Blum)
ice pond just melts ssssshhh/frog jumps ripple (circle) green/green (circle) green green (Lin Haire-Sargeant)
Ancient pond, ancient/ silence–until a frog leaps/ down and up leaps splash! (Debra San)
An old pond lies still./A springing frog awakens/Shattering water. (Josh Cohen)
A quiet old pond/Frog jumps into the water/The quiet pond sings (Hu Hohn)
A pond full of frogs;/A jumping and one goes in;/Kersplashing echoes. (Albert Lafarge)
Music: John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman, “My One And Only Love” (1963)
Nick Cave’s Augment!
Writes Professor Cheryl Clark:
One perfect afternoon we spent at Bodiam–my first visit there. It was still the old spell-bound ruin, unrestored, guarded by great trees, and by a network of lanes which baffled the invading charabancs. Tranquil white clouds hung above it in a windless sky, and the silence and solitude were complete as we sat looking across at the crumbling towers, and at their reflection in a moat starred with water-lilies, and danced over by great blue dragon-flies. For a long time no one spoke; then James turned to me and said solemnly: “Summer afternoon–summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)
Write Lin Haire-Sargeant and Robert Gerst:
Above, Lin Haire-Sargeant and Carol McCarthy enjoy a moment with (the spirit of) Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, whose magisterial novel The Magic Mountain the Liberal Arts reading and discussion group Constant Readers have been reading this spring semester. Leon Steinmetz led the Mann discussions.
What’s Constant Readers?
Constant Readers are Mass Art people who gather together to read fiction, poems, and prose for the joy of reading. No oaths of allegiance! No dues! Just people who share a conviction that novelist William Faulkner expresses in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The writer’s privilege, Faulkner proclaims, is “to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
In Fall 2018, Debra San led a discussion of sustained contradiction as a literary mode, Robert Gerst led the readers in considering the state of academic freedom in contemporary American higher education, Louise Myers led the readers through James Joyce’s The Dead, and Paul Bempechat led the readers in considering musical settings of great poems created by great composers.
Starting September 2019, there’ll be more. Lin Haire-Sargeant will be leading the readers into the world of twentieth century novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea. And then a play by Beckett or Chekhov? A history of the turbulent twentieth century?
Email Lin Haire-Sargeant to join our email list, to hear about dates and times of forthcoming gatherings, to read what we’re reading, to pitch a book or a writer you’d love to talk about with people who love to talk about books.