In March of 1917 my father began having confused, clamorous dreams. The month’s journal opens with a dream of a revolt of the blacks in his hometown. Crowds of ordinarily peaceful people appear on the streets in front of his boyhood home. They are woolly headed and are carrying “bolas”—knifelike weapons which my father says he had never known about until after the dream. My father tries to placate them; he talks to them from the porch and asks to see their pistols. Then he tells them about a gun he has, a big army .45. The crowd breaks up.
In another dream he returns to college and there meets an old friend, but the friend for some reason cannot recognize him. His teeth break in one dream. In another he meets his brother—who often appears in the dreams of this period. His brother asks him a question that he cannot understand, and my father replies in Chinese, which his brother cannot comprehend. In another, while holding down the shafts of a rickshaw for some friends, my father is lifted high above the ground and then brought down again with a painless but uncomfortable crash. He dreams that he and his Chinese students are swimming and executing fanciful dives near a waterfall. One of the students is swept over. On the night of March 13 he dreams of an immense building with “wide high flights of white steps.” There is confusion in the building; lights are burning in various rooms; stray dogs wander in and out. Somehow he is in charge of the great flight of stairs. On the sixteenth he dreams that “aeroplanes” cover the sky. They turn out to be kites, but while he watches, a real plane flies in among them. A few nights later he is traveling on a steamer. Three bombs explode somewhere on board, and the ship is sunk, but my father manages to get to a rocky wild shore. He is impressed with the vegetation in the tidal pools, and it occurs to him that he may have to eat it to survive on this island. But then, in the way of dreams, he sees civilized people, one of whom he knows, who are swimming and having tea.
On the right-hand page of this dream diary the record of his daily life helps only with the superficialities of his dreams. He uses real people, places, and events as cast and setting; the plays remain deeply symbolic. War was surging around him in those years: the civil unrest in China, the Great War in Europe, and the Russian Revolution. Ships were sinking, bombs were exploding, and things did appear to be falling apart. One night he dreams that he is a child again, at home in Centreville, in bed. His father comes in and explains that he has been in a sporting event with the Kaiser. His father struck the Kaiser, and then later the Kaiser appeared in full military uniform, demanding an apology, which his father refused to grant. On the right-hand page of the diary my father writes that in Shanghai they were waiting daily for news of the impending outbreak of war with Germany. During this same period he dreams of revolutions in Russia and Germany. Crowds surge into streets demanding democracy. He dreams again of crowds in Centreville.
There are certain recurrent symbols in my father’s dreams; one is the presence of a large empty house, another is the presence of dogs—they are forever wandering in and out of his interior landscapes. Early in March he dreams that he is exploring such a house with his mother, who, as he points out on the right-hand page, was not living at the time of the dream. He and his mother wander through the house and, on the third floor, come to a succession of small bedrooms with beautiful mahogany beds and fine counterpanes. The rooms are notable for their extreme neatness and the absence of other furniture. In time they come to another series of rooms and to a window. From this window there is a magnificent view: “A great lowland country stretched away to a wonderful serried mountain chain which was partly obscured by mist. At the foot of the mountains there stood a splendid city.” He can tell by the minarets and graceful domes that the city is Constantinople. Some of the buildings appear to be gold.
He had never seen Constantinople, but he had been reading the night before of a mountain in the Cévennes (Pic de Finiels) with the Mediterranean in the far distance (he was probably reading Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey). Late in the month—coincidentally on the same date on which, fifty years later, he would die—he experienced what seems to have been the most significant of all of these strange dreams.
He finds himself again inside one of his great buildings, complete with wandering stray dogs. This time he and a number of people are somehow locked in. He manages to get a door open and begins to search for a way out, but encounters instead more corridors that seem to lead nowhere. Finally, he comes to a large room that is lined with a series of doorways. Each door is shut, and on each are written illegible words. But one door has a lamp beside it and the lettering here is quite clear. The door is marked “The Room of Death.”
My father is very curious about this room; he wants to look in but is afraid. Then suddenly a girl with light hair appears and prevents him from entering. Seeing her he feels a deep contentment, and he asks her if she has a message for him. She leans toward him intimately. “You must know,” she says. “I would not have come here if I did not care for you.”
Not long after this the dream journal becomes sporadic, and finally, after a few post-China entries, ceases altogether.
The journals of Henry Thoreau, which some consider his best work, concern themselves not so much with personal matters as with the three great themes of his life—the mystic quest, the study of natural history, and the business of living well. There are moments when, in an oblique way—in a manner almost designed to lay itself open to interpretation by future biographers—Henry records some of his feelings. In particular there are the passages dealing with his relationship with Ellen Sewall. He also sets down, from time to time, his recurrent dreams. One is his account of the rough and the smooth, a dream in which, at one moment, he finds himself lying on a very uncomfortable, rough surface somehow associated with death. Shortly thereafter he is on a smooth surface, very pleasing to the touch. Another, perhaps more significant dream is a recurrent vision of a mountain top. This is a wonderfully universal dream, clearly related to the spiritual heights symbolized by mountains and to the experiences that he had on Katahdin and on other climbs.
In the dream he must work his way up through a dark and unfrequented wood at the base of the mountain. Slowly, as he ascends, the trees begin to thin, and he emerges onto a rocky ridge with stunted trees and wild beasts. Finally he loses himself in the upper air and clouds and achieves a summit that is somehow above the earthly line, which has a “superterranean grandeur and sublimity.” “You are lost the minute you set foot there,” he writes. “You know no path, but wander thrilled, over the bare pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud.”
This dream, which he had at least twenty times, seems to prefigure his ascent of Katahdin. There he struggled up through a dark forest and across a rocky stretch where the trees were stunted, and where, as he imagined at least, bears lurked in their dens below him. Finally he entered into a kingdom of clouds and air, a sublime swirling universe where everything was obscured.
Given the metaphor, it is little wonder that Henry turned around on Katahdin and, without ever achieving the actual summit, descended to his friends. To go on would have been death.
Henry’s dream mountain seems to have been located on a hill just east of Concord Center—in the same place where the village burying ground is found—and it is little wonder that he should have used such a place in the landscape of his dreams. The association of heights and the afterlife seems fairly clear.
I have had, over the years, a recurrent dream that is in exact opposition to the ascendant dreams of Henry Thoreau and the wide steps and vistas of which my father dreamed. My dreams are pre-Christian and classical: I descend into the underworld, into the surreal architecture of the Paris Metro and the New York subways, where, unfortunately, I have spent more time than I would like. Here in the half-lit subterranean world, trains come and go carrying passengers; crowds move silently and determinedly; and around me, ascending and descending, are moving stairs on which people stand patiently. Tracks run above and below; there are many platforms, ticket counters,
and turnstiles; and of course I am lost in the midst of these labyrinthine tunnels. My quest there is to get on the right train and thereby, like Orpheus, get back into the upper world.
In the way of dreams, the place is very familiar to me even though I am lost. I make my way through the passages and turnstiles into a well-lighted car that deposits me at a wide station platform, emptied of crowds. Here, at the very end of the platform, is a narrow stairway with light spilling down from the other world. I walk to the stairway and ascend. Even though this dream often begins in Paris, when I finally break out into the upper streets I am invariably in New York—oddly enough, somewhere in the Bronx. But this is not the city of dark canyons, wandering gangs, and derelict buildings. It is a semiwilderness, a wide landscape where the sun is shining and a fresh wind is blowing.
That March in my cottage I had a similar dream involving trains. The day before I had the dream was one of those abnormally warm March days, when the ground virtually oozes, when mourning cloak butterflies appear, and the song sparrows and redwings seem to call with more intensity than usual. I took a walk late in the morning, following the same route I had taken on skis during the winter, and ended up in the parking lot of the Digital plant.
I was still getting nowhere in my attempts to gain entry into LKP 595. I had received no official response to my requests to visit the place, even though I had, as instructed, humbly submitted them in writing. I would call from time to time to find out how my case was faring, but the public relations officials were rarely able to come to the phone, and none returned my calls. Once or twice I did get through and was assured that my case had been “pitched,” but that the possibilities of talking to managers or engineers inside LKP 595 were slim.
The difficulties of obtaining an audience simply whetted my curiosity, and the mystery of the plant began to grow in my mind. The building began to seem ominous, and although I knew that Digital Equipment was among the most humane of large corporations, the secrecy of the place, the chain link fence, the ever-searching TV surveillance, and the seeming impenetrability of the structure combined to create in my imagination a dark cathedral dedicated to some nefarious god. I could not help but think of a book published by the friend of a friend of mine. His thesis was that the computer is the embodiment of Ahriman, the dark overlord of early Zoroastrians, who has returned in electronic form and is living inside the computers of the world, attempting to spread evil.
The TV surveillance cameras of Ahriman and his minions paid no attention to me that March day as I crossed the Digital parking lot. They searched blindly, indifferent to my presence. Just as I was about to return home, I saw a man in cowboy clothes with a beard and shoulder-length hair getting into an old Saab. It occurred to me that if I were ever to gain entry into LKP 595 it would be through personal rather than corporate contact, so I went over to him and explained my mission.
I had found the right person. He turned out to be not only friendly and talkative but also an old line “Deccy,” as the longtime Digital workers refer to themselves. In spite of his appearance, he was rather highly placed in the company, and although he was at first slightly skeptical, he said that he might be able to show me around sometime, but that he would have to think about it a little, since employees were not supposed to admit simply any stranger. I think I convinced him of my ignorance—and my innocence. As I explained to him, I barely knew what software was. We exchanged telephone numbers, and I promised to call him in a week or so.
That night I had a Digital dream. In the background of the dream there stood the great flat cathedral, dark windows absorbing the light. But somewhere in front of the building, on my side of the valley, there was a small trolley with open cars. The employees of the corporation sat obediently in neat rows while the train carried them across the valley to their place of work. I boarded the train, and then I noticed the ticket taker and driver (or engineer). He was a large man, ever so polite, and without looking up, and in an entirely businesslike way, he took my ticket and turned to the controls to start the train. I recognized the driver the minute I saw him: it was the “engineer” Kenny Olsen.
Before I took my seat, I looked back along the length of the train. The workers were all sitting in their proper places, waiting. Then I saw that the last car was only half-filled, and far in the back, in the last seat, which ran all the way across the back of the car, there sat an odd-looking individual. In contrast to the brightly clad Digital workers, he was dressed in a gray-brown suit, a white shirt, and a black silk bow tie. He was small, had thick, light brown hair and was sitting with his legs crossed, with one arm thrown irreverently across the back seat. At first I thought he was staring directly at me with his intense gray-blue eyes, but then I realized he was looking beyond me at the driver of the train, Kenny Olsen. The man in gray had a sort of cynical, resigned smirk on his face as if to say, “You see, I knew it would come to this.” I recognized him immediately too: it was Henry Thoreau.
12
The Cruelest Month
ON THE TWELFTH of April a great congress of crows collected in the white pine trees just west of the stone wall by the meadow. They gathered not long after dawn and set up a racket that woke me immediately. The noise increased; little groups would rise above the trees, hover, settle, rise again, and beat their wings madly, cawing all the while. I made coffee and carried a cup out to the terrace, but as soon as I sat down, the congress came to some obscure decision and moved on. A huge shouting wave of crows rose above the trees and streamed down the open meadow, crossed the road, and disappeared into the old fields below the house. Somewhere down by the flood plains of Beaver Brook they settled again. I could hear them cawing in the distance, their voices rising and falling in the morning air.
There is something tremendously evocative for me in the calling of a flock of crows. When I was young I used to spend summers on my uncle’s farm in Maryland. The Eastern Shore is good country for crows—wide stretches of corn and grain fields interspersed with tall groves of hardwoods for roosting. Every summer morning I would be awakened by their raucous calling and see the rolling flocks wavering over distant fields. To this day the sound of flocks making up at dawn brings memories of open summer windows, the smell of rural dawn, and fresh-cut hay.
I had been thinking a lot about Maryland, since I had not only been reading my father’s accounts of his childhood there, but also rereading the journals of a landholding cousin of mine who spent most of his life on the Eastern Shore, a man who, although talented in a number of fields, seemed to prefer obscurity. Doctor John, as he was called locally, actively sought the small life.
John died unexpectedly one afternoon in spring after returning from one of his frequent nature walks. He came into the house, announced that he was tired, took off his boots, and lay down on his favorite couch. He was found four hours later, at peace, finally. After the funeral, people stayed on at his house, nosing through his possessions, and I happened to find his nature journals, the one record he kept of his life. Those few days I read over sections of them, trying to find some key to the man. Of all my older cousins, of whom there are many on the Eastern Shore, he was the one I appreciated the most and understood the least. I used to take walks with him sometimes and in fact had walked with him one spring day not long before his death.
Each spring my brother Jim makes a pilgrimage to the Eastern Shore, where he stays with family and friends, visits my father’s grave, and wanders around various former family holdings and shrines paying homage to a way of life that ended for my family in the 1930s, when my parents left Maryland for good. Since I was myself delving into the past through my journal reading, I decided to leave my cottage and go with him that April.
I drove to Jim’s house in Connecticut, and the next day we went down to Easton and stayed on a boat belonging to one of Jim’s many women friends. It was still cold on the water and the boat was unheated, but we slept there for a few nights and wandered the countryside by day. The second day we visited my
cousins in Centreville, who lived in the house where my father was born. They told us yet again the stories about the Eastern Shore that we had heard in our childhood, a slow, almost sacred litany of the places and the people that were the foundation of the family that we were once a part of. We also visited the farm where Doctor John had lived.
The place had changed hands by this time, so my brother and I drove down to the river bank to a house next to John’s property, a house where I had spent a summer with my parents the year I was fourteen. From there, skirting the marshy shores of the Chester River, we walked down to John’s. Above us on the hill we could see the old river house, its formal front door, as with all the eighteenth-century dwellings in these parts, facing not the road but the river, where all the traffic passed in those times.
We began to climb toward the house, discreetly staying out of sight. On the way up the hill we passed a little spur road where I had last walked with Doctor John one March day back in the 1960s. He and I had gone down to the river to catch the glinting afternoon light and watch the packs of geese gather on the bay beyond the point. There was a wind coming off the water, and as soon as we stepped from the shelter of the woods into the stubble of the corn field, it spilled across his forehead, loosing a few strands of gray hair. Crows in the bare trees behind us gabbled among themselves, holding their wings out like paper kites about to lift off. There were foxes in the ground, and fox squirrels and fox sparrows in the woods, and the air was saturated with the rank smell of moist soil. In the distance we could hear the yelp of the geese, and we could see them far beyond the fields, a patch of moist gray, the color of December. Once, standing near here, John and I saw a huge raft of swans and geese rise up from the river and settle somewhere beyond the point. The flock was so immense that the vanguard had landed before those at the rear had even taken wing. The result was a huge arc of gray bodies and wings in the air, a long, resounding bridge that stretched over the bay. John said the flocks were like fugues, like intertwining themes. He loved music—the long line of the cello, the sound of the leaves scuttling at his doorstep, the call of geese, and the summer bark of bullfrogs in the pond on the inland side of his property. People used to say he thought too much.
Living at the End of Time Page 18
