Friday, February 4, 2011

"And through the whole appearance runs some continuity"

In 1913 an English youth visited North America, sending letters home which were published in the Westminster Gazette. He returned home in 1914, and would die while sailing to Gallipoli, 1915. 


Class by class they paraded, beginning with the veterans of the '50s, down to the class of 1912. I wonder if English nerves could stand it. It seems to bring the passage of time so very pres-ently and vividly to mind. To see, with such emphatic regular-ity, one's coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in num-ber, summer after summer!


Perhaps it is nobler, this deliberate viewing of oneself as part of the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the flow and transiency become apparent and poignant. In five minutes 50 years of America, of so much of America, go past one. The shape of the bodies, apart from the effects of age, the lines of the faces, the ways of wearing hair and beard and moustaches, all these change a little decade by decade, before your eyes. And through the whole appearance runs some continuity, which is Harvard.

The orderly progression of the years was unbroken, except at one point. There was one gap, large and arresting. Though all years were represented, there seemed to be nobody in the procession between 50 and 60. I asked a Harvard friend the reason. "The War," he said. He told me there had always been that gap. Those who were old enough to be conscious of the war had lost a big piece of their lives. With their successors a new America began. I don't know how true it is. Certainly, the dates worked out right.




Rupert Brooke
Letters from America
Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916©
Alan Sutton, 1984©



5 comments:

  1. This is indeed one's own experience, all these years later, but of a bluer shade. It first resonated thusly as a mere boy at my own father's Yale 25th reunion, but remotely and distantly like so many fantasies, and then at my own all those years later, but through a more vivid, nay baroque lense. Yes, I have been there. Time. Place. Context. I thank you, sir.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You make a good case for the proposition that the sociable interplay of memory can critique and affirm the scroll of history; and of course resistance is felt for modesty's sake, which only calls for learning, judgment and resolution to present themselves as they were given to us all to do. Thank you for sharing your time here and at RD.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Speaking of gaps . . . As a young man , in my late twenties and early thirties, I spent a lot of time frolicking on Fire Island, basking in the summer's glow, and playing amongst the sand and surf. I wondered, then, where were the men in their late forties and fifties? For there was a gap, then, a wide one, between those of us and those in their late fifties and older. The missing men had been struck down by a scourge of a different sort, and were noticeably absent to those of us who longed to learn from them, hear their stories, and enjoy their companionship. I have lamented the loss of that generation ever since, as a child does his own father or uncles.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You're arguing - as one doesn't put it past you, to know - for the first verse in the poem cited in the next succeeding entry, "Sea Canes." As you certainly also know, the "Blue Remembered Hills" blog has developed this subject very well, in regards to gaps within one profession. Now you turn over an analogy consciously held by many in the interval you describe, between its trauma and those of warfare. Recurringly, much of the poetry of Derek Walcott anticipates that perspective; in any case, here is that verse, with thanks for your contributions to our thoughts -

    Half my friends are dead.
    I will make you new ones, said the earth.
    No, give me them back, as they were, instead,
    with faults and all, I cried.

    ReplyDelete