Eucatastrophe Reader

"An Effort. An Essay of Love"

Too Anxious for Rivers by Robert Frost REVIEW

“Too Anxious for Rivers" reminds me of a number of Robert Frost poems. It deals with the mystery of where we all came from (like “The Woodpile”) and where it could all be going (like “After Apple Picking”). In “The Woodpile” Frost finds a cord of stacked wood in the swamp decaying and wonders where it came from. In “After Apple Picking” Frost wonders if the final sleep is a short one or a long one. Here in “Too Anxious for Rivers” Frost is looking at a torrential river and noticing that its origin is only hearsay and its destination is beyond the scope of his vision.

Look down the long valley and there stands a mountain
That someone has said is the end of the world.
Then what of this river that having arisen
Must find where to pour itself into and empty?

The deficiencies of Frost’s vision into the past and the future is compensated by an overabundance of observation about what is in front of him. Where life comes from may be a legend. Where it may be going may be a mystery, but life is certainly going on all around us with a vengeance.

“I never saw so much swift water run cloudless.”

In other words, there is a lot of life in the world, all apparently without a cause (river is raging’ not a cloud in the sky). And here is where Frost’s poetic eye shifts from the outward to the inward and he reflects on things internal.

“Oh, I have been often too anxious for rivers
To leave it to them to get out of their valleys.
The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing-to Question-What-Doesn’t-Concern-Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.

“Perhaps these questions without answers are not worth stressing over,” Frost seems to be saying. “There must have been a beginning. There must be an ending. Maybe we do not need to know anything else and it is a mercy to us that we do not know?" This launches the poem into a comparison between scientific ways of knowing and mystical ways of knowing.

The world as we know is an elephant’s howdah;
The elephant stands on the back of a turtle;
The turtle in turn on a rock in the ocean.
And how much longer a story has science
Before she must put out the light on the children
And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?
‘You children may dream it and tell it tomorrow.’

Whether you are a mythology teacher or an astrophysics teacher or a philosophy teacher, in the end, you have as much assurance about these things as a child’s dream can give. Maybe, Frost suggests, the ancient philosophers were right. Maybe we once knew the answers to these questions of
“woods, lovely, dark, and deep” and have to wait to remember.  

Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.
What set us on fire and what set us revolving,
Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us
‘Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn’t have fared into space like his master
To find ‘twas the effort, the essay of love.

Frost concludes his poem with veiled agnosticism combined with a hint at what his own hope is. Maybe the Roman writer Lucretius’ theory will suffice in the absence of ocular proof? Maybe life is here because of some combination of actualized intention and articulate affection – what folks in my theological camp would call, “intelligent design”?

There is a song by Iris Dement entitled “Let the Mystery Be” that captures what I think Frost may be trying to say.

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack

Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
And I ain't saying it ain't a fact
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
And I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
But I choose to let the mystery be

Everybody is wondering what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Question for Comment: Do you see life as “an essay of love”? Something structured resulting from thoughtful kindness? Or is it a "tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury"? 

“. . . and then she made the decision that would prove fateful to them all."

The Secret Keeper REVIEW

“. . . and then she made the decision that would prove fateful to them all. “Come on,” she said . . . Let’s go back inside.”

“There was a part of her that wanted to scream - “No,” to curl up in a ball and weep for the things she'd lost, for everything in her life that hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped, but she wouldn't do that. She couldn't.”

Kate Morton’s books (I use the plural even though I am only a few pages into my second one) seem to have a Thomas Hardy-like fixation on how momentary fate combined with young adult decisions can control a whole life’s destiny. Her characters understand that that there are wounds that you endure in life when some “better life” is marred by some unfortunate – on the surface, innocent event – like a letter not being mailed when it should have or a schedule that did not permit for a five minute resolution to a misunderstanding. A war can do it to you as well. There can be, as she puts it, “a physical ache” when you realize that you can “never go back.”  

Morton also seems to like to explore the ways the lives of parents before they have children cast a long shadow into those children’s lives. “Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born,” she says in her book, The Distant Hours, “not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past.” Sometimes people, like the characters in her books, get intrigued enough to go exploring those parental lives. But honestly, it is easy to see why many people do not take this adventure as they will have no control over what they find.

In the Secret Keeper, 16-year-old Laurel Nicholson is sitting in a tree near her family’s home in 1961 doing a bit of sulking when a man comes down the road. Laurel’s mother comes out of the house with Laurel’s baby brother and the man approaches. Suddenly, the knife that Laurel’s mother – her dear beloved mother – was bringing out to cut a birthday cake – flashes. And Laurel watches as her mother stabs the stranger in the middle of the road and kills him.

Here is how Morton describes the scene as it unfolds:

“The whole scene has an expectant charged feeling like a theater stage in the moments before the actors walk out from the wings. When every possibility stretches ahead and fate has not been sealed by circumstance, and then - ”

It will take Lauren a whole lifetime and us an entire novel to find out just what happened and why. The book is full of regrets about the past and about the family secrets that are embedded into all our lives by these stories that our parents and grand parents and great grandparents wrote with their decisions. It seems odd but, I think we all assume that if anything important happened before us, our parents would tell us . . . and we cannot imagine them lying. In all of those life stories, there were moments - moments infused with meaning for those who experienced them and those of us who still feel their influence.

“There were moments, Lauren solemnly believed, in which a person reaches a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life’s events.”

As this story unfolds (I will not spoil the plot), its characters, Dorothy Smitham, Jimmy Metcalf, Vivien Longmeyer, Katie the guardian, Henry Jenkins, Kitty, Jimmy’s father, and a total stranger who finds a misplaced letter and mails it - all bring their peculiar stories to the potluck for fate to cook with. Fifty years later, as Dorothy Nicholson is about to die, she is still not explaining what happened on that hot summer day. But her daughter Laurel has decided that she cannot wait no longer. She intends to investigate this “great unspoken event in the family’s history.”

The investigation takes a winding path that is well worth walking yourself. It involves marriages never meant to be, marriages that never got to be, and marriages that were blessed to be. It involves mis-understandings, rich dowagers, senile fathers, abusive husbands, jealous lovers, and German bombs falling on London all to keep it interesting. And in the end, the pieces kaleidoscope together.

“All this time, Laurel realized, this whole search she’d been on, had been driven by a yearning need to know that her happy family, her entire childhood, the way her mother and father had looked at one another with such rare abiding love, was not a lie. And, now she did. Her chest ached with a complex blend of burning love, and awe, and yes, finally, acceptance. ‘I love you, Ma,’ she whispered, close by Dorothy’s ear, feeling, as she did, the end to her quest. ‘And I forgive you, too.’”

Perhaps there is no way to get to that moment before we die if we do not start asking questions while the clues still exist.

Question for Comment: How does the story of your parents lives before you came along affect you today? Or is it just best not to know?