Abandoned New England Farms 20050605.00 This is a summary of my reflections on two small books, "Here and Nowhere Else," by Jane Brox; and "String Too Short to be Saved, recollection of summers on a New England farm," by Donald Hall. They represent the May and June assignments to a Senior Citizens Book Group of the Belmont Public Library. Inasmuch as they address the same issue: the disappearance of the traditional New England Farm, these books are appropriately considered together. The Brox Farm is located in Dracut, Massachusetts, just west of Lowell. Donald Hall's Farm is near Wilmot Flats in Central New Hampshire, just north of Mount Kearsarge. Both authors are college graduates, Brox from Colby, Hall from Harvard. Both compose their books about the farm in early mid-life at about age 40, Both are dissatisfied with city life and yearn for the country, but neither of them wishes to be a farmer, and neither is able to preserve the farm that he or she purports to cherish. The titles of their books already tell much about the authors: "Here and Nowhere Else" is palpable overstatement. Brox's farm is in fact anything but unique, and farm-stands such as the ones in which she worked and which she describes abut the sides of many New England highways. What is justifiably unique is the author's personality, the subjectivity and passion with which she tackles both her farm work and her writing, and the loneliness of the existence that she reaps from her efforts. "String Too Short to be Saved," is an understatement in a far more sophisticated tenor. Probably the author, who I infer was a Professor of English at the University of Michigan, has read Either Or, and the anomalously labeled cardboard box, discovered in neglected attic storage, whose label he adopts for a title, is an image, however faint, of the locked desk from which Kierkegaard's anonymous editor extracted the papers of A and B. Grampa's stories in themselves, like the pieces of string, are too short to be saved, but are saved nonetheless by the author, not in a cardboard box but between the cardboard covers of his book. Both authors have been lured, whether by their editors, by the public's appetite for confession, or by journalistic indolence, to compose spurious autobiographies, to write about themselves, in the first person, unavoidably embroidering their memories to make their books more interesting, and denying themselves and their readers the blissful amnesia to which Hoelderlin alludes in the lines: "In seliger Selbstvergessenheit zu sinken ins All der - 2 - Natur." "To be submerged in blissful oblivion in the infinity of nature." The credibility hazards of autobiography are virtually unavoidable. In autobiography, the line between assertion and diffidence is so fine that only an acrobat could negotiate it without falling. Even more fundamental: the truth about ones spirit is subjective, the truth about ones (public) person is objective. If, therefore one writes passionately about ones spirit, one exaggerates, belittles, or distorts ones public image, and if one writes realistically about ones public image, one cannot but conceal, disparage or betray ones spirit. Neither of these authors has succeeded in avoiding these pitfalls; both have laid themselves open to intrusive inquisitions into their personal lives. Indeed such inquiries are unavoidable consequences of any conscientious interpretation of their books. It appears that the role of Donald Hall's father was assumed by the grandfather on whose farm Donald spent, one would infer, most summers from age four to age seventeen. The grandfather's eloquence which is echoed in the grandson's literary compositions weaves a web of family relationships at whose center are the two immediate representatives. To my memory, even within a week of my reading, the characters of the stories and the stories themselves fuse one into the other. But there appears out of the mists of time, a family aristocracy of strong intelligent industrious men and women, who in addition to making hay and milking cows, read, think, and write, and present their literary compositions at the local Lyceum, a New England aristocracy that sharply distinguishes itself from a rural underclass who live in houses with leaking roofs, who drink or steal or lose their farms to financial ruin and foreclosure. All this in the awesome aspect of Mount Kearsarge, for whose grandeur and beauty Donald Hall expresses especial reverence, and vivid in memory, Ragged Mountain, whose blueberry harvest serves Grampa and Donald as an endurance test. The descriptions evoke a panorama of mountain scenery as an impressive a backdrop to the history of the spirit. It seems unlikely that when the professor of literature described his blueberry picking ordeal on Ragged Mountain, he had entirely forgotten, or had become wholly oblivious of the scenes of Zeus in Council with his fellow deities on Mount Olympus, of Noah landing on Mount Ararat, of Moses' momentous tete a tete on Mount Sinai, of Abraham's murderous insanity on Mount Moriah, of Jerusalem arising in glory on Mount Zion, of Christ's colloqui with Satan, and his transfiguration on Galilean peaks of unmeasured and perhaps unmeasurable elevation. The psalmist wrote: "I will lift up - 3 - mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." (Ps 121) The poet understands that each time one of us arrives hot, sweaty, thirsty and exhausted on the pinnacle of any mountain, if the air is clear, and the vision is sharp, then some, if not all of those peaks should be visible in memory and imagination. Brox's book, if my memory serves me right, was written affectively in the present. It is untouched by any awareness of transitoriness or transition. And similarly Hall seems an awkward swimmer in the stream of time. Memory is not, as is often implicitly assumed, a reproduction of an objective world. Memory is not even a reproduction of a previous subjective experience. Remembering is an emotional and intellectual, a spiritual process, if you will, which requires forgetting as its complement, if not indeed as its basis. Memory entails a psychological, perhaps also a physical dialectic. In order to be able to remember one must be able to forget; and one of the facets that troubles me most about both books, though more about Hall's, than about Brox's because his is the more profound, is the absence of all references to the failure of memory, to the inability to remember, of any admission that one has only an imperfect recollection of the past. For only that which has teetered on the rim of oblivion and is subsequently recovered, is truly remembered. And only oblivion provides us with an understanding of the passage of time, with that awareness of the transitoriness of our lives which is essential if we are to die in peace. Both Brox and Hall were youthful when they wrote their books. The memory of the child differs markedly from the memory of the old man or woman, both in content and in quality. The child is impatient of constancy and is readily wearied by samenesss. The memory of the child clings to the most minute details. For the old man time passes quickly because he so readily forgets what it has brought. Nonetheless, that which has not been tempered by forgetfulness is not susceptible to being remembered, and to be able to remember, one must be able to forget. Both Brox and Hall are too young to write about a spiritual process which is the property of old age. Forgetting has an obvious psychological function. The mind is under continuing assault from external and internal stimuli, from visual and auditory perceptions, and from the after-images and echoes of its past. In order to function, the mind must serve as a sieve, discarding what is irrelevant, immaterial or inopportune to its immediate concerns, but elaborating, modifying, and "remembering" the rest. It is common, when one is trying to find the answer to an intricate problem, to seek to shelter ones mind from distracting chatter. In a similar manner, oblivion, the processes of forgetting, shields the mind from the disturbing chatter of the past. - 4 - In the autobiography or the memoir, the conceptual void left behind by the selective processes of forgetting has a significant esthetic function as well. Lapses of memory are analogous to the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance painter, and even more so, to the impenetrable shadow in which the subjects of Rembrandt's portraits are characteristically envelopped. For this darkness, by attenuating definition, ameliorates the viewer's duty to come to terms with the geometry of the image. It provides a refuge for his intuition, and permits him to supplement the configuration on the canvas with his own experience and understanding. Finally, as a practical matter, few assertions will so discredit a witness as the claim to remember everything in every detail and to have forgotten nothing; for the jury cannot help but suspect that at least some of the testimony must have been invented, and it will be at a loss to select what should be believed. That is the case with autobiographical writings as well. The ability to forget and the ability to remember are preconditions for metamorphosis and change. It is the young person who clings desperately and fervently to that which exists, to the furnishings of the only world that he has known. One learns as one grows old that life is change, and that to survive, one must change with it; but that not to be capable of change is to risk being crushed by circumstances or events. A further consideration raises the question of the quality of Grampa's relationship to nature. Both his story- telling and his occupation are in some hazard of being in competition and interfering with his contemplation of woods and fields. I think that Donald Hall assumed, in a spirit of filial loyalty, that Grampa exemplified an optimal relationship to nature, but closer consideration suggests that this may not have been the case. For to judge by the stories he tells, his chief interest was in his relatives, in his ancestry and in the rural aristocracy of which he was a part. The various immediate beneficiaries of nature, its exploiters, if you will, the hunter, the shepherd, the farmer, fisherman, the developer, the sportsman, the naturalist, are not infrequently in contest and competition for the use of field and forest. Surely, the exigencies of farming distract from the pure esthetic enjoyment and appreciation of nature, whatever that might be; and if one subtracts the paternal-filial bond between grandfather and grandson from the equation, it is not at all evident that the farmer's environmental interests should coincide with those of the disillusioned college professor who has chosen early retirement to enable him to seek solace and seclusion in a pastoral setting. * * * * *