I was quite surprised to come into class last week after reading Washington Irving and find that the class immediately put “Rip Van Winkle” on trial for failing to say anything.

It is like Billy Collins’s assessment of students reading poetry:

           

“I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

           waving at the author's name on the shore.

 

But all they want to do

 is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

 

They begin beating it with a hose

            to find out what it really means.”

 I didn’t know how to answer the suggestion that Irving presented no clear moral. While reading I forgot to demand one of it. I accepted the story like folk art, believing it must have truth because it rung true and sounded as though an honest human had made it. Irving’s writing – his apparently perfect diction, his flawless rhythm and careful construction – nourishes the ear, eye, and mind. It transports the reader.

And Rip’s sin – minding everyone’s business but his own – is lesson enough for me. I do occasionally come to the realization that I would get three times as much work done if I simply stopped talking. May I not soon forget Rip’s lesson in industry.

And if we seek morals, we must not forget the benefits we glean from the bad example of Van Winkle’s pestilential wife. Her exaggerated nature hardly smacks of disrespect to the whole gender. It rather echoes the Bible: “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.” Irving’s paraphrase, perhaps: “It is better to sleep for decades and have your rifle rust and your house abandoned and your dog turn evil than to live with Dame Van Winkle."

 

Chelsea Kolz

"Rip Van Winkle

Senior

Fall Semester 2012