It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller.Have you ever had a beggar come up to you and begin a story of misery sounding like an excuse and a little like a trade. Yeah I'm begging you for money, but it's because my mother had cancer when I was two and since then I've been struggling and now my son just committed suicide and I don't know how to go on, but life's hard you know? And then you give or do not give the money, but you can see in their eyes that the story doesn't hold any emotion for them any more. It's what they're resigned to. The telling is the price they pay for your donation. There's a solidity in the eyes, a monotony in the tone that tells of the degradation. To be so broken that we no longer expect the world to treat us as human...I had to have surgery. They got most of it, but now the medicine costs alot and I lost my housing because I couldn't work while I was in the hospital and all I need is a few dollars for some food so I can think straight and maybe then I'll get back on my feet. It's that their tragedy has to be told as an excuse for why they haven't got what you've got. And you need to hear it so that you can give them money and not feel like you're tossing a bone to a dog. Because it takes away someones dignity to accept charity. You may not think it and the audacity with which some beggars beg may refute it, but that's a wound, too, isn't it? To have to beg? When did we forget that begging isn't pleasant? That to beg you have sell that which made you human, your dignity? Look closely into the eyes of the next person who begs from you. When they tell you their market-speech, their packaged tale of woe to get your money, look at their eyes and sure enough you'll see, it's not the eyes of a human anymore.
You'd be astonished, I assured him, how slight the differences really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn: and age, and sex, of course; that's all. Now, isn't it true, Dr. Phelps, that almost any twenty women--unselected, you know--would weigh about a ton? And surely there's no particular reason why just human shells should weigh as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another. One would think they tried to be--manners and habits, knowledge and victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them thinking pretty much the same: Norm-Thoughts, you know; just five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn't so much mind the monotonous packages, if the contents were different. Forty feeding like one--who said that? Now, truly, Dr. Phelps, don't you feel--It would, of course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all teh little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too, wouldn't it?...And it isn't quite my own idea, either.
I should not like to go to Hell in the snow.
Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often. it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it.
But then, I remarked with a sigh, Fanny seems to make friends wherever she goes.
It isn't the making, replied her mother, but the keeping.
Quite a little reception for you, she beamed at me, after a particularly respectable carriage had cast its occupants' scarcely modulated glances in my direction. How strange is human character! To an intelligent onlooker, my other little reception must have been infinitely more inspiring; and yet she had almost wantonly refused to take any part in it. Now, supposing I had been Royalty or a corpse run over in the street....But we were come to our journey's end.
What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless, and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in string, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human fumblings resulted only in 'grannies' and not in the true lover's variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too, in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders.
Oh, and never say it again. Please, please, if you care for me the least bit in the world, never, never say what you did again. I poured out the heedless words in the sweet-scented quiet of midnight. Now--now go, I entreated. And indeed, indeed, I am your friend.
Oh, Mrs. Bowater, I turned at last, here I am. You and the quiet sky--I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self if one is always changing?
But think. There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts--my imagination, with you; isn't that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking , and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like--oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you. No, no; it's only a story--why even all this green loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr. Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone.
Oh, but you see--haven't I told you?--I can't love you. Perhaps; I don't know....What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose, I went on, I like myself that much, and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!--and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. Now do you understand?
The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go rooting and rummaging in Mrs. Monnerie's library, like a little pig after truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted--old plays, and street ballads; Johnson's enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book on Melman in love; Bel and the Dragon, the Newgate Calendar. I even nibbled at Debrett--and clean through all its 'M's'. The more I read, the more ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off.
I seemed to have lost the secret of daydreaming.
However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them--certainly not 'out of their power and love'--but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about 'beauty' , too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than--well, its 'meaning'. As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's way.
His face grew solemn. Lord have mercy upon me, he said, to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.
I suppose the mastery of this book comes in the speaking of injustice and inhumanity with the frankness of one who daily experiences it. To be misused, mistreated, and misunderstood from birth to grave and to know with resignation that this is how it is. We all know this feeling, though we may deny it. But whether we are the homeless who have marshaled our sob-story in rote monotone, as if it were the commodity purchased by others' charity, or if we are the mother who does dishes after everyone in her family has left them in the sink or on the table, or if we are the employee who bows to the whims of a manager, it's all the same. What is in truth something worth screaming about, we narrate calmly as the facts of our lives. Only most authors become so outraged they forget that the resignation is part of our story, de la Mare does not.
1 comment:
Interesting thoughts, Everything. Back when I was a young lassie I had an English professor who would have waxed (and spat) poetic about how those very speeches you reference are in fact the only vestige of true performative street art left in America. In Europe this is a much more dignified, though much less creative, profession: people paint themselves and stand perfectly still to earn the same amount of money. Here in the States we tell stories.
-EverRead
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