Burnt Norton

Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot begins with the words: “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.” 

My mama always said to us children, “let’s redeem the time,” whenever she hoped for a task to be completed promptly. She hoped we would not dilly-dally about our chore, and yet she was saying more than simply, “hurry up.” She was saying something, maybe not consciously, about time itself. She believed it could be redeemed. The idea that time can be “redeemed” is an assumption that time is a thing, an object that can be held, quantified, contained.

The first section of Burnt Norton contains an empty garden with roses that “had the look of flowers that are looked at.” It  contains an empty alley, an empty pool. And then the bird says, “go, go, go” because “human kind/ cannot bear very much reality./ Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been./ Point to one end, which is always present.”

Time is not a commodity. When time becomes a thing then human kind cannot bear it. The roses are simply looked at. The pool is drained. Time, however, is life. It is always present because time is caught up in humanity, human life. Time is not something that can be clinically portioned into sections. If time is cut into pieces then it dies, and so does life. It becomes an item to be numbered and looked at. It is no longer a beautiful mystery, but rather a bare skeleton, drained.

Our society views time as something to be chopped into little pieces, to be destroyed. We portion our days into little segments for different activities. We move to the mechanical tick, tick, tick of our clocks which tell us to “go, go, go.” Time has been locked into a little box and so it locks us into little boxes of our own. Our lives have become not our own, but rather run by the time cut into little ticks.

If we are to break free of these boxes, we must venture first to break free from a mechanistic view of time. Time is not a commodity. It is our life. If we view time as bits and pieces to be “redeemed” then our life also becomes broken into bits and pieces. A complete view of life can only come when time is once more whole, inexplicably made up of the past, future, and present.

A Rose for Emily

I found William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” to be an engaging, morbid tale that portrays a glimpse of change over time in the South. The town of Jefferson, the character of Emily, and the behavior of the townspeople all spoke to a changing era. Emily is described as “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” She lived in a time past—one where her taxes had been forgiven ad infinitum and one where her father held a dominate position of authority in her life. She is eccentric, an oddity that the community both pities and disapproves. Emily refuses to put a house number on her home when the postal system is implemented, and she refuses to pay taxes when the town approaches her with her bill. She writes letters with ancient paper and faded ink. Emily is sealed in a time that is slowly passing away in Jefferson.

Faulkner notes that most of the townspeople and authorities who watch Emily are “the next generation, with its more modern ideas.” These men believe that the previous generation’s pardon of Emily’s taxes are bogus, replace antebellum homes with garages, and construct pavement throughout the town. This is the modernity that Emily cannot accept.

Yet, the townspeople seem to be caught in the crossroads. While in many ways they eager for the changes the new generation brings, still cling to many traditional Southern ideas. (The most prevalent traditional notion in the story is the idea that Homer, being a Northern laborer, is below Emily’s social status.)

The final revelation of the story—that Emily had murdered Homer and locked his body in her house, cements the idea of resisting change. By killing Homer, Emily has preserved him the way he is, for her alone. Emily cannot lose Homer to time, and also has conformed to the town’s traditional demands (she is no longer seen in public with Homer). Perhaps more specifically, Faulkner’s story is about the human fear of change—Emily refuses to accept the fact that her father has died, refuses to lose Homer to time, and refuses to accept modern demands (paying taxes, putting up house numbers). Instead, she locks herself away from the world, growing fat and turning grey. 

The White Heron

I absolutely love Sarah Orne Jewett’s story “The White Heron;” the breathless cool beauty with which she painted her story is dynamic in a surprising way. In some ways, it reminded me of Hawthorne – but in most ways her voice is distinctive and hers.

“Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away.”

I love the twining of life and beauty; no matter what we might say about Jewett’s faith, this is a very Christian idea. It seems like the dilemma set before Sylvia – accentuated to marvelous effect by Jewett’s regionalism – is love at the expense of life within the context of people, or life at the expense of love, within the context of the world. She chose the latter, and I don’t blame her. People are transitory, and love (although doubtless in the future little Sylvie will realize how necessary people, and by extension love for them, are.) for them fragile. The world, or nature at any rate, always remains more or less constant, and its enduring beauty was, to Sylvie at any rate, worth protecting over giving this new, pleasant, bloodied young man what he wanted. In some ways I envy this little girl her union with nature (not a naturalist. NOT.) if it was more of a means to enjoy and commune with God through His creation. Her choice was a completely valid one (even if it would be more meaningful if situated in a Christian context)—she kept her integrity with nature.

Imagination and Authority

Jack London’s To Build A Fire brings up to interesting thoughts concerning the nature of man. The first relating humanity to imagination and the second relating humanity to authority. The question is: can humanity survive without at least one or both of these?

London writes: “the trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.” The man is aware that the weather is cold, but he does not see the significance in this coldness. The weather signifies the frailty of man. He cannot survive in this weather on his own. The dog can survive, but he cannot.

The man is caught up in the particulars of himself and his surroundings, but does not allow himself to relate these particulars to abstracts. He does not even have time to think. He computes, but he does not comprehend or even contemplate. Reality has lost significance to him and it results in the loss of his very existence.

Besides ignoring his imaginative faculties, the man ignores authority. “The old timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself.” He thought. The man is so confident in himself and his faculties that he ignores the words of authority. He ignores the wisdom of age. This is his ultimate downfall, and he realizes it in the end. “‘you were right, old hoss; you were right,’ the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.”

Imagination would have helped the man realize his own insignificance. He was helpless to survive alone; he needed another man. Even if he had not used his imagination he should have listened to the advice of one who had come before him. The dog did not ignore the advice of the ages: “the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge.” Man does not have this natural inheritance, but he must inherit it somehow. He must be taught.

If man must be taught to use his imagination and to respect authority, then it seems that much of the education today is not truly educating. Children are taught that history is ever evolving; they are the future and the truth. They are taught principles undermining the very authority which teaches them. If instead they were taught to use their imaginations, they might realize their own frailty and dependency. They cannot not exist apart from their elders. They are founded in the past and cannot separate themselves from it.

Education must be tied to both imagination and authority. If it is not children will grow up to find themselves as helpless as the man who perished for want of a fire.  

Emily Dickinson: On Death and Eternity

Emily Dickinson:

                Much of Dickinson’s poetry deals with the theme of death. In many of her poems, death is seen as something that is simply part of nature. It is neither good nor evil, it simply is, and therefore should not be feared. In one poem, she discusses how as a little child she thought death was the door into immortality but as she grew older realized that death was only cold and led only to a sort of oblivion. In other poems, death may allow for some sort of person hood to remain, but this is not quite clear. Many of her poems about death have pantheistic connotations and undertones. Often what enables people to have some kind of person hood after death is when others remember the ideas they died for, or at least this is an idea one of her poems hints at. She never really treats death as something to be feared or dreaded. It simply is. This clashes with the idea found in the Bible that death is not normal, not how things are supposed to be. Christ has removed the sting of death by defeating it, so we need not fear death. But there is Heaven. It is not a strange nothingness we enter into, but rather it is either eternal life or damnation.  Dickinson says don’t fear death because it is part of nature. God sees death as evil, something to be defeated, and Christians need not fear it because Christ has defeated it.  While we can enjoy the beauty of her poetry, we need to make sure that we do not inadvertently pick up the pantheistic thinking found in her poems, or forget that death is not how things were meant to be. While it is part of the world we live in now, it is a result of the Fall, and therefore an evil that has been conquered by Christ. 

The Yellow Wallpaper

 

 

Here is some wisdom from Maurice Sendak, who describes the illustrator Randolph Caldecott:

“Caldecott is too careful and too elegant an artist to become melodramatic; he never forces an issue, he just touches it lightly. And you can’t say it’s a tragedy, but something hurts. Like a shadow quickly passing over.” 

I first read "The Yellow Wallpaper" at the insistence of a neighbor. She warned me about its interpretation, easily feminist, but admitted that she loved it anyway.

So I sat in her small house and read the story, and once I had finished found that I shared her opinion. The story works. It does what a story does - wraps us up in itself and holds our gaze. And indeed, if you want to hold a reader's gaze you can hardly choose a subject superior to insanity.

I appreciate the idea of "something hurting." At least partly for this reason I find myself more fond of American literature than the other literature we study. Perhaps I owe this to my exposure to American literature while growing up. Or maybe I owe it to the fact that I am more familiar with the cursed world I live in than the heavenly world I'll live in later.

Unlike Caldecott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman does verge on the melodramatic. But, again, given the subject, is anything too dramatic?

The ending of the story, deliciously gruesome, delivers what the reader wishes. Unlike Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth," the ending of which deeply satisfies, "The Yellow Wallpaper" thrills the reader with its wildness.

Perhaps it is because everyone aches that "The Yellow Wallpaper" has, as Dr. Hake says, "Come into its own right" while "The Wife of His Youth" has "gone the way of the dodo." In my opinion, not only do we need -as Christian readers are prone to insist - hopeful endings and redemptive elements, we also need someone willing to acknowledge the depth of our ache.

Chelsea Kolz, fall 2012, senior

Green Paisley instead of Yellow Wallpaper

When I was a child I used to curl up in my dad’s big green recliner. It was a large, thickly padded chair that could have hosted three of me at once – which made it perfect for napping in. I used to lie between its arms and trace my fingers along the paisley pattern that stretched itself over and around the chair and its welcome embrace. I would draw up and around the lines and imagine the angry face of a vicious king scowling over the rest of the chair with commanding looks. And there below him was the fearful expression of a princess peering back at me, as if to beg my aid. But she could not escape his wrath. I found her there, just as she was before, every day when I laid my head peacefully against the arm of the chair. I would watch her try to run away, but she was hopelessly bound to him by the unsympathetic yarns of paisley. They looped up and through her and knotted around the king. I would invent stories of her escape and exile, but that was always after I found that she had been caught again. I never saw her free. I didn’t want her free.

And I very much doubt that Gilman wanted her “princess” free either.

I can sympathize with Gilman’s depressing longing for freedom – something like comfort taken in the feeling of loneliness. If we are alone we cannot be hurt. At least it seems that that is what Gilman’s mother believed. But as much as we stretch and pull against the yarns that bind us to others, I think that we none truly want to be truly free. We are not quite able to convince ourselves that loneliness does not hurt.

But when we are lonely we don’t want to beg for comfort. We don’t want to turn to the people who have left us alone and call them back to ourselves. No. We want to run as fast as we can, get as far as we can – so that we can look behind in hopes that we have been followed.

What we really want is to be pulled back into the great big arms of a familiar recliner – where there is room for more than one.