Once Upon a Time in New York

A modern fairytale.

Once upon a time, a restless vagabond visited New York on a quest. The ancients of her village had instructed her to find a hidden treasure, one that would refresh her soul, touch her spirit, and wash away the tired callouses of life, advising, "New York is a kingdom of many hidden treasures that will speak to your soul, yet the key is to find the one meant just for you."

The vagabond marveled at the Shakespearean sonnet gardens in Central Park, for her love of the Bard was great and her fascination with iambic pentameter endless. "Perhaps this is my treasure," she thought. "Regardless, it is a treasure no doubt, but I will continue my journey."

The little vagabond trudged on through the shifting shades of the swaying trees, marveling at jazz musicians and wandering opera singers, until she stood quietly contemplating an angel beckoning to her from a captive sea. "I shall add this to my treasure of memories," she thought, "though my hidden treasure is yet to be found."

At the sight of a crying maiden she was much disturbed, and pitied the maiden's unfortunate dye job while secretly envying her perfect eyelashes. "The esteemed Sir Lichenstein is a great treasure indeed," she noted, though perhaps not the one she sought.

Next, the vagaond turned to find herself viewing the most beautiful painting she had seen in her life. "Never," thought she, "have I seen all of the magic, heartbreak, joy, and beauty of the entire world held captive on a single piece of canvas."

"I shall add this to my memories of my greatest moments in life," she thought, "and yet, inexplicably, I feel that my quest is not yet complete."

A great arch by surprise did take the damsel, and her eyes strained to decipher the mysterious carvings and gallant words. Though it was indeed of stunning stature and style, the scent of viands of Italian influence irresistibly drew her away to the village of green witches. There, she found neither witches nor sorcerers, instead savoring hidden bookstores, crisply scented ice cream parlors, delightfully grungy cafes, and succulent oases of spice, sandwiches, and cider.

The next morning, after sleeping above the fragrant open-air shops selling Lady Chelsea's flower, the vagabond set out once more. "Soon I must return to my hamlet, so I must find the hidden treasure soon."

She trekked along the broadest way she had ever trod, marveling at the throngs of sojourners and colossal, seemingly mile-high paintings of minstrels, merchants, and musicians. The little vagabond spotted one in particular, which stood confidently apart from the rest, like a phantom surveying the unknowing world of the daytime. 

The little vagabond smiled. For her quest was complete.

Featured Quote: Walt Whitman

"Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier, 

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole..." 

"Daybreak Gray and Dim" (1890s)

Walt Whitman

I came across this striking painting while on a business trip in San Francisco, California. Post-conference, my great (truly great) aunt and I visited the de Young Art Museum, located in the beautiful Golden Gate Park. Among the grand landscape paintings of the Hudosn River School hangs a small painting, nearly dwarfed by the surrounding paintings' sheer breadth of canvas. Frederic Edwin Church swirled sunset hues into the shape of a tattered American flag, with the starry night sky suggesting the flag's own starry canton. Rather uncharacteristically, I actually appreciated its sweet sentimentality, and then was about to move on when I spotted the year in which Church painted "Our Banner in the Sky": 1861, the dawn of the Civil War.

So, speaking of Walt Whitman and the Civil War...

A couple of weeks ago saw the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. And only yesterday, I finished reading Edith Wharton's novella "The Spark," centering on the effect that Walt Whitman's fictional friendship had on a young, uneducated Civil War soldier's morale fiber, in turn affecting the remainder of his life. The young soldier, now old by the end of the novella, simply knew Whitman as the "big backwoodsman" who visited him in the army hospital, and neither remembered Whitman's name nor knew of his poetry. In fact, the last lines of the novella reveal the old veteran's surprise at hearing Whitman's poetry for the first time:

"He was a great chap, I'll never forget him. --I rather wish, though," he added, in his mildest tone of reproach, "you hadn't told me that he had wrote all that rubbish."

The Spark

Edith Wharton

I love Walt Whitman's poetry. I love its freedom and intuitiveness, its merging of beautiful, melodic rhythms with unfettered honesty. And yet, it held no interest for the soldier, since to him, it fell short of the real-life, straightforward conversations he had valued. It seemed frivolous to him, a betrayal of Whitman's grittiness and humanity.

A little of this reminds me of my father, or "Papa," as I always have called him. A brilliant, self-made man who gathers up knowledge like I hoard art supplies, his library is full of historical biographies, studies of World War II and the Civil War, and works on the American West. It does not surprise me that he, a man of exceptional character, would surround himself with the biographies of historical figures with larger-than-life personalities and strengths so equal to his own. I am sure that Papa is too humble to realize this, and would honestly insist that he reads for knowledge, adventure, and understanding. 

I have never seen him read a single work of fiction.

When I bring up my love of fiction for its insight into human character, this is generally how the conversation goes:

Me: "You love reading so much, you really ought to try fiction."

Papa: "I'm not into books about unicorns and vampires." 

Me: "That's fantasy." 

Papa: "Fiction and fantasy are the same thing...."

Me: "Agh, no! No no no no no!

Papa: ".... and I want to read about real life."

Me: "Anatomy of a Murder, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Help are all strongly based on real life, but the authors created them as fiction in order to weave a specific and powerful message with carefully-crafted details. It's not 100% made up, just altered with a purpose."

Papa: "Well, non-fiction isn't altered at all."

Me: "But non-fiction is mainly just facts, while fiction lets you learn more about human character and even more about yourself."

Papa: "I've only read one work of fiction in my life. I had to do a school report on Dracula. It was horrible. I am never reading fiction again."

Me: "Dracula's awesome! I mean, yeah, it's horrible, horrible."

Favorite First Line.... EVER

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

 

Cannery Row (1945)
John Steinbeck

Featured Quote: The House Haunted

"The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the rows of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hearth." 

 "Afterward" (1909)

Edith Wharton

Featured Quote: Ray Bradbury

The library deeps lay waiting for them. 

Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

Ray Bradbury




 

Featured Quote: Sherlock Holmes

As we watched it the fog-wreaths came crawling round both corners of the house and rolled slowly into one dense bank on which the upper floor and the roof floated like a strange ship upon a shadowy sea.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured Quote: Autumn

The morning sunshine poured into the library through ten long narrow windows; birds were singing; the autumn air, rich with a faint aroma of November melancholy that stung the imagination pleasantly, filled my antechamber.

The Damned, Algernon Blackwood

Autumn nears us slowly, and though it is only August, the refreshing crispness of the last few days inspires me to post this quote from Blackwood, who brought beauty even to the most ghostly stories.

Featured Quote: The Crushing Comeback, Hamlet Style

Hamlet: ...Will you play upon this pipe?

Guildenstern: My lord, I cannot.

Hamlet: I pray you.

Guildenstern: Believe me, I cannot.

Hamlet: I do beseech you.

Guildenstern: I know no touch of it, my lord.

Hamlet: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guildenstern: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.

Hamlet: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Travel, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I love how this poem captures the wanderlust that calls inexplicably and powerfully to many souls. St. Vincent Millay also evokes the visual beauty of steam engines, a love that I know I inherited from my father.

"Travel"
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

The railroad track is miles away, 
And the day is loud with voices speaking, 
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day 
But I hear its whistle shrieking. 

All night there isn't a train goes by, 
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming, 
But I see its cinders red on the sky, 
And hear its engine steaming. 

My heart is warm with friends I make, 
And better friends I'll not be knowing; 
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, 
No matter where it's going.

Featured Quote: The Hobbit

"Their feet ruffled among the dead leaves of countless other autumns that drifted over the banks of the path from the deep red carpets of the forest."

The Hobbit (1937)
J.R.R. Tolkein

Above the canal ruins,

Harper's Ferry, West Virginia

Featured Quote: Reading

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

George R.R. Martin

Book in a Maryland antique store

Travel to Germany through Niemandswasser

I just finished reading Robert Aickman's superbly chilling collection of short stories, compiled in Cold Hand in Mine. Fortunately, none of the stories have scared me to death as the book's cover threatened. Instead, what really shakes me is the fact that none of the stories show a clear resolution. As the friend who lent me the copy predicted, the failure to make each story's elements fit together logically is driving me nuts.

Of all of the short stories, "Niemandswasser"* (1975) left the strongest impression. Aickman creates such striking visual imagery, crafting dark, lavish descriptions of the foreboding castles, quaint chateaus, and haunted lakes, that I felt that I had just viewed a beautiful Gothic painting, or taken a time-warp tour of Germany through the eyes of Shelley. Aickman does not overload the reader with lengthy descriptions, instead creating an overarching ambiance that remains both subtle and unforgettable. Beautiful yet terrifying, blending the best traditions of classic ghost stories with Aickman's own penchant for penning unresolved nightmares created by the subconscience. 

Part of me would love to visit the old German schloss Aickman described with such dark relish - while the other part is very happy that I can leave the cursed castles (pronounced cur-sid if you're Vincent Price) anytime by simply closing the book. Which, of course, I cannot help but reopen.


*Translation: No Man's Water.

Featured Quote: The Horse

“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; 

the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.” 

Henry V (circa 1599)
William Shakespeare

Knight's steed at the 36th Annual Maryland Renaissance Festival
Joust staged by "The Freelancers" :)

Featured Quote: My Favorite Quote from Shakespeare!

"But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,

Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill."

 Hamlet (circa 1600ish), 1.1.166-167
William Shakespeare 

Featured Quote: Edgar Allan Poe

"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."

Edgar Allan Poe

- In memory of my little friend. -

Featured Quote: Stone Ruins

"Thou are the ruins of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of time."

Julius Caeser (circa 1599) 3.1.254
William Shakespeare

Ruins of a stone house in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

Aboard the HMS Bounty

I am so excited, since I recently got the chance to see the ship "" "Bounty," a replica of an old British ship that used to voyage around the world over two hundred years ago. 

The ship was built in 1960 for the film Mutiny on Bounty (1962), starring Marlon Brando. Although a replica of the original ship, it was actually built one third larger than the original, to make room for camera crews and allow easier movement around the ship. The ship towered dramatically into sky, dwarfing people, cars, and even buildings.

Alice in Wonderland

I found a hilarious Alice in Wonderland mug at the Annapolis Bookstore, right on Maryland Avenue in historic downtown Annapolis. The Annapolis Bookstore is a gem. I have found scores of used and nearly new Agatha Christie novels, a like-new copy of Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (a gorgeously illustrated Cinderella-style story set in Africa, which I loved as a kid), and some neat, engraved "This book belongs to..." bookplates, not to mention an old-style inkwell, gold-colored ink... just about everything that can draw book lovers in like magnets.

Ode to Ohio

The sprawling farmland surrounding Lebanon, Ohio, is verdant and welcoming to the weary road vagabond.

Whizzing past farmland just 
outside Lebanon, OH

Lebanon is beautiful rural area of the state, a quiet haven less than an hour northeast of the city of Cincinnati.