i was forced to suspect i was no longer young

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Peerless. Digital montage © 2021.

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Samuel Johnson, in a letter to Joseph Baretti, July 20, 1762— 

Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was little known. My playfellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young.

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a cool clutch and four gears and even reverse

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Hammer Smith (© 2021). Digital montage.

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An unidentified aging British chaffeur and auto mechanic, recalling his youth as a worker on an estate, in Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age. New York: Penguin Books, 1980, p. 65—

I’ll tell you how I learned to drive. There was a shooting party and I had just got this car all washed and polished and clean, ready for the pick-up—the guns—when a boy came out of the house to put some dirt in the dustbin. I called out, “Come for a ride, Harry?” just as a joke, laughing, you know, but then in Harry jumps aside of me, looking pleased and excited. So what could I do? I was sixteen. I'd watched old Crossley [the estate chauffeur] with the gear-lever and the brake, and I told myself, “If he can do it, I can do it.” So I reached for the pedals and suddenly there we were, dashing down the front drive! That drive was a mile long and ended at the bottom lodge, where the village policeman lived. I was driving straight to prison, I told myself, for taking the motor. And could I turn it round and bring it back? But that lovely motor had a cool clutch and four gears and a reverse, and by luck I managed them all—brought it back safe, washed it all over again, and nothing was seen or said. That was the first time I had a drive and I’ve been driving ever since.

rum, agony, complete carnage, noise and death

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Table Talk (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Anonymous (a retired, 79-year-old British man, who, at age eighteen, while serving in France during World War I, had survived crippling battlefield wounds), quoted in Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age. UK: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 135-136—

[While serving in the trenches] we reached a line the Germans had just vacated and on the next morning, after being made to drink a lot of rum, I went over the top for the first time. Everybody has written about it and nobody can describe it. Not really. The legs and arms of the dead stretched out, the ripped bellies of the horses steaming and stinking. And the dead faces of mates looking up at you out of the filth. Filth. Men made into filth before your very eyes. “He’s finished,” you’d say to yourself, and in a way you were glad he was! Because there was this useless agony because you’d got to go. How I prayed then! “Over the top!” it was, and there you were, running and falling. After the first time I fell asleep in a trench filling with water and was nearly drowned. We were on the Somme. It was solid carnage, noise and death. There was so much death then that it doesn’t matter to me now. Or should I say, it doesn’t worry me now. Now that I’m getting on for eighty, and when there’s not a morning when I don’t thank God for it. Day come, day go.

mortality's end / pack a case and leave the rest

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 Above Roy R. Behrens, Carte Blanche (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age. New York: Penguin Books, 1980, p. 103—

A man who dies at forty will usually show one cause of death, wrote Alex Comfort; a man who dies at eighty will probably show nine or ten, so that had we cured the one that in fact killed him, he would have died soon after of something else. Behind this bleak truth lies the reason why so many aged leave home for homes. They are deteriorating. Their mortality, which has been kept in check or which has been concealed for so long, is now unhideable from themselves and from their families and neighbors. The effect of these last diseases, their breaking down of the organism, is called “not being able to manage.” The pressures from inside and outside then begin, and just at a moment when the smallest decision requires a mighty effort, one is asked to make what for most people is a tremendous effort—to go on managing, and knowing that you can’t, or to be managed. To pack a case and leave the rest. Travel light has always been the advice given to pilgrims and the old people’s home repeats it, though for its own convenience, not for the new resident’s.

dust to dust as we totter toward the end of time

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 Above Roy R. Behrens, Architectonic (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Wiliam Hazlitt, “On the Fear of Death” in Table Talk (1822)—

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

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Roy R. Behrens, “Khaki to Khaki (Dust to Dust): The Ubiquity of Camouflage in Human Experience” in Ann Elias, et al., eds., Camouflage cultures: beyond the art of disappearance (Sydney AU: Sydney University Press, 2015)—

…“I am I” and, to follow, I am not “not-I.” Or, I am “self” as distinguished from “others.” We typically regard our “selves” as permeable identities in a bouillabaisse of ubiquitous “stuff,” a surrounding that seems to a newborn, in the famous words of William James, like “a blooming, buzzing confusion.”  One wonders if this might also explain, as Ernst Schachtel suggested, why we are all afflicted by “childhood amnesia,” leaving us with little or no memory of the first years of our lives, because we lacked the “handles” then—the linguistic categories—that enable us to “grasp” events. In recent years, increased attention has been paid to the various forms of “amnesia” at the opposite end of life, including gradual memory loss, senility, dementia, and the horrifying ordeal of Alzheimer’s. If the boundaries of our figural “self” are blurred when we are newborns, perhaps we should not be surprised that the limits of our “self” grow thin—once again—as we totter toward the end of time.

As adults, we use hackneyed phrases like “dust to dust” to imply that at birth we somehow spring from naught; that we metamorphically evolve through infancy and childhood; live out our ritualistic lives as corporeal upright adults; then slowly—or, just as often, catastrophically—“deconstruct”; and (at last) are literally “disembodied” in the process that we dread as death. Instead of saying “dust to dust,” it may be more in tune to say “khaki to khaki,” since it seems as if our lives consist of time-based re-enactments of a spectrum of nuanced relations between figure and ground, some or all of which pertain to varieties of camouflage. 

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Catacombs of the Capuchins in Palermo, Italy

Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta: in a series of letters to William Beckford, Esq., of Somerly in Suffolk, from P. Brydone, F.R.S., 1773. English Edition: New York: Evert Duyckink, 1813—

This morning we went to see a celebrated convent of Capuchins, about a mile without the city; it contains nothing very remarkable but the burial place, which indeed is a great curiosity. This is a vast subterraneous apartment, divided into large commodious galleries, the walls on each side of which are hollowed into a variety of niches, as if intended for a great collection of statues; these niches, instead of statues, are all filled with dead bodies, set upright upon their legs, and fixed by the back to the inside of the niche: their number is about three hundred: they are all dressed in the clothes they usually wore, and form a most respectable and venerable assembly. The skin and muscles, by a certain preparation, become as dry and hard as a piece of stock-fish; and although many of them have been here upwards of two hundred and fifty years, yet none are reduced to skeletons; the muscles, indeed, in some appear to be a good deal more shrunk than in others; probably because these persons had been more extenuated at the time of their death.

Here the people of Palermo pay daily visits to their deceased friends, and recall with pleasure and regret the scenes of their past life: here they familiarize themselves with their future state, and choose the company they would wish to keep in the other world. It is a common thing to make choice of their niche, and to try if their body fits it, that no alterations may be necessary after they are dead; and sometimes, by way of a voluntary penance, they accustom themselves to stand for hours in these niches…

I am not sure if this is not a better method of disposing of the dead than ours. These visits must prove admirable lessons of humility; and I assure you, they are not such objects of horror as you would imagine: they are said, even for ages after death, to retain a strong likeness to what they were when alive; so that, as soon as you have conquered the first feeling excited by these venerable figures, you only consider this as a vast gallery of original portraits, drawn after the life, by the most just and unprejudiced hand. It must be owned that the colors are rather faded; and the pencil does not appear to have been the most flattering in the world; but no matter, it is the pencil of truth, and not of a mercenary, who only wants to please.

The senescent departure of Emerson's life

Karl Blossfeldt photo adapted (2018), Roy R. Behrens

Edward Simmons, From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee. New York: Harpers, 1922, pp. 19-20—

The last time I saw Mr. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson was in 1879 [three years prior to Emerson’s death]. I was in my twenty-seventh year, had just returned from California, and was spending some time in Concord [MA] before going abroad. Charles H. Davis, the painter, was visiting me at the Old Manse, and we both went over and supped with him. He seemed much older, but was still that example of perfect serenity I had known as a boy. His memory was beginning to fail him, which made him a bit querulous, but his daughter Ellen supplied it whenever she could. For example, he forgot that he had ever seen Tom Taylor's tribute, or apology, to Lincoln, in Punch—in spite of the fact that it is included in the Parnassus [Emerson’s own anthology of poetry] and read it to us, at my request, with astonishment and delight. He read beautifully. and his voice retained all of its old hypnotic quality.

While his memory failed in the detail of names and places, he still retained, in most cases, his fascinating mode of expression, and the process of thought was still there. He said the night Davis and I were there—

"Last week, it was the day…the day that…who was it was here? Ellen, can you remember? Oh! It was our religious friend." He referred to [John Greenleaf] Whittier.

He asked, upon going out for a walk, "Where is that thing everybody borrows and no one ever returns.” He meant an umbrella and had forgotten the name.

This story was told me by my mother. They knew (the women) that opinion of [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow was the same as theirs—the Bromides—and that the two men, of course, loved and admired each other—which they did not. Of course, Mr. Emerson must go to the funeral of the poet. Accordingly. the poor man was pulled up, himself more dead than alive [Emerson would die one month later], and brought down to Cambridge. He sat at the church, seemingly unconscious of the raison d’etre of it all. Then he rose (holding on to his coattails was not effective) and joined the procession about the body.

On crossing the Cambridge Common later, he suddenly stopped, faced around toward the church, and then looking at them, said:

"I do not remember the name of our friend we have just buried, but he had a beautiful soul."

In some people, the loss of memory can be a blessed thing.

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Edward Bok (his account of visiting Concord MA, at age eighteen, to obtain Emerson’s autograph), The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years Later. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921, pp. 54-59—

After a while she [author Louisa May Alcott, a close friend of Emerson] said; "Now I shall put on my coat and hat, and we shall walk over to Emerson’s house. I am almost afraid to promise that you will see him. He sees scarcely anyone now. He is feeble, and—“ She did not finish the sentence."But we'll walk over there, at any rate.”

[…]

Presently they reached Emerson's house. and Miss [Ellen] Emerson [his daughter] welcomed them at the door. After a brief chat, Miss Alcott told of the boy's [Bok’s reference to himself] hope. Miss Emerson shook her head.

"Father sees no one now," she said, "and I fear it might not be a pleasure if you did see him. “

[…]

"Well," she said, "I'll see."

She had scarcely left the room when Miss Alcott rose and followed her, saying to the boy, "You shall see Mr. Emerson if it is at all possible."

In a few minutes Miss Alcott returned, her eyes moistened, and simply said: "Come."

The boy followed her through two rooms, and at the threshold of the third Miss Emerson stood, also with moistened eyes.

"Father," she said simply, and there, at his desk, sat Emerson—the man whose words had already won Edward Bok's boyish interest, and who was destined to impress himself upon his life more deeply than any other writer.

Slowly, at the daughter's spoken word, Emerson rose with a wonderful quiet dignity, extended his hand, and as the boy's hand rested in his, looked him full in the eyes.

No light of welcome came from those sad yet tender eyes. The boy closed upon the hand in his with a loving pressure, and for a single moment the eyelids rose, a different look came into those eyes, and Edward felt a slight, perceptible response of the hand. But that was all!

Quietly he motioned the boy to a chair beside the desk. Edward sat down and was about to say something, when, instead of seating himself, Emerson walked away to the window and stood there softly whistling and looking out as if there were no one in the room. Edward's eyes had followed Emerson's every footstep. when the boy was aroused by hearing a suppressed sob, and as he looked around he saw that it came from Miss Emerson. Slowly she walked out of the room. The boy looked at Miss Alcott, and she put her finger to her mouth, indicating silence. He was nonplussed.

Edward looked toward Emerson standing in that window, and wondered what it all meant. Presently Emerson Ieft the window and, crossing the room, came to his desk, bowing to the boy as he passed, and seated himself, not speaking a word and ignoring the presence of the two persons in the room.

Suddenly the boy heard Miss Alcott say: "Have you read this new book by [John] Ruskin yet?"

Slowly the great master of thought lifted his eyes from his desk, turned toward the speaker, rose with stately courtesy from his chair, and, bowing to Miss Alcott, said with great deliberation: "Did you speak to me, madam?"

The boy was dumbfounded! Louisa Alcott, his Louisa! And he did not know her! Suddenly the whole sad truth flashed upon the boy. Tears sprang into Miss Alcott's eyes, and she walked to the other side of the room. The boy did not know what to say or do, so he sat silent. With a deliberate movement Emerson resumed his seat, and slowly his eyes roamed over the boy sitting at the side of the desk.…

For a moment he groped among letters and papers, and then, softly closing the drawer, he began that ominous low whistle once more, looked inquiringly at each, and dropped his eyes straightway to the papers before him on his desk. It was to be only for a few moments, then! Miss Alcott turned away.

The boy felt the interview could not last much longer. So, anxious to have some personal souvenir of the meeting, he said: "Mr. Emerson, will you be so good as to write your name in this book for me?" and he brought out an album he had in his pocket.

"Name?" he asked vaguely.

"Yes, please," said the boy, "your name: Ralph Waldo Emerson."

But the sound of the name brought no response from the eyes.

"Please write out the name you want," he said finally, "and I will copy it for you if I can."

It was hard for the boy to believe his own senses. But picking up a pen he wrote: "Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord; November 22, 1881.”

Emerson looked at it, and said mournfully: “'Thank you." Then he picked up the pen, and writing the single letter "R" stopped, followed his finger until it reached the "W" of Waldo, and studiously copied letter by letter! At the word “Concord" he seemed to hesitate, as if the task were too great, but finally copied again, letter by letter, until the second "e" was reached. "Another ‘0,'" he said, and interpolated an extra letter "—in the name of the town which he had done so much to make famous the world over. When he had finished he handed back the book, in which there was written:

The boy put the book into his pocket; and as he did so Emerson's eye caught the slip on his desk, in the boy's handwriting, and. with a smile of absolute enlightenment, he turned and said:

"You wish me to write my name? With pleasure. Have you a book with you?"

Overcome with astonishment, Edward mechanically handed him the album once more from his pocket. Quickly turning over the leaves, Emerson picked up the pen, and pushing aside the slip, wrote without a moment's hesitation:

The boy was almost dazed at the instantaneous transformation in the man!

Miss Alcott now grasped this moment to say: “Well, we must be going!"

"So soon?" said Emerson, rising and smiling. Then turning to Miss Alcott he said: "It was very kind of you, Louisa, to run over this morning and bring your young friend."

Then turning to the boy he said: "Thank you so much for coming to see me. You must come over again while you are with the Alcotts. Good morning! Isn't it a beautiful day out?" he said, and as he shook the boy's hand there was a warm grasp in it, the fingers closed around those of the boy, and as Edward looked into those deep eyes they twinkled and smiled back.

•••

Typographic Poster | Erin Keiser

Typographic Poster © Erin Keiser 2015

Above Poster by Erin Keiser, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), in celebration of the typeface Myriad, designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly.

•••

Samuel Clemens, The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Charles Neider, arr. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959, p. 3—

For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whiskey toddy when I was six weeks old but I don't tell about that any more now; I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not, but my faculties are decaying now and soon I should be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

•••

Franklin P. Jones—

Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.