No Thoroughfare

First off, the complete works of an author as prolific as Dickens, all compiled into a single file, can be enough to crash a Kindle or Kindle app! But how else am I going to read Dickens’s plays? I actually do have a hard copy, but they’re in a little edition from the nineteenth century; the red leather is so brittle and flaky, patches of rust-colored dust cover clothes, furniture, and floor after even a short glance inside. So finicky Kindle version it is.

Secondly (second off?), these complete works collections available for $0.99 are fairly unreliable. Dickens wrote a play called No Thoroughfare in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and then teamed with his friend again to write a prose version of the story, but my “complete” works file contains only the prose version and yet groups it with the plays. (Who knows? Maybe the dramatic version is in there somewhere under the wrong title and grouped with speeches or poetry.)

Thirdly, I thought I had read the prose No Thoroughfare previously, but, as I went through it in recent days, I didn’t remember any of the story and was quite surprised to find that the “story” is actually longer than any of Dickens’s Christmas books. Maybe I just forgot it all, but maybe I hadn’t really read it before. In any case, I thought I was going to enjoy another one-sitting play but ended up reading a novella that took about three days.

I don’t know if I would recommend No Thoroughfare to anyone other than someone like me who just enjoys reading everything Dickens wrote. Its story of an adopted orphan trying to find his birth mother may resonate with readers today. But the book also contains a character who implicitly trusts the owner of a business because, well, you know, because entrepreneurs are naturally honest and hard-working. I believe Dickens when he says that people like this or the Cheerybles from Nicholas Nickleby truly existed and were known by him personally, but I understand that this kind of character doesn’t sit well with a culture that has lived through Bernie Madoff. It also involves a melodramatic fight scene on an Alpine cliff above a melting ice promontory and not just one or two but three wild Dickensian coincidences that are all essential to the workings of the plot. (One character continues to say, “The world is small,” as if the author knew he had to sell even nineteenth-century readers on the possibility of these freakish conjunctions.) Altogether, it’s just not what most people want to read now.

But I liked it.

Read Your Notes!

My wife and I love to watch The Amazing Race. In this show, a ten-time Emmy winner for Best Competition Series, teams travel around the globe and perform challenges that might involve learning a location’s traditional dance, participating in a local business like food delivery or denture fitting (!), or matching portraits of historic figures with living models appropriately dressed and coifed. It’s an inspiring travelogue with the added bonus of human interest and competition.

But occasionally during an episode, the viewer’s almost continuous sense of awe is interrupted by frustration as a team heads out on a challenge without picking up the required equipment or hails a tuk-tuk when the clue explicitly says to proceed on foot to the next destination. The most frequently uttered phrase on the lips of the Amazing Race afficionado: READ YOUR CLUE!

I recently finished Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion for the third time in my life. I remembered (incorrectly, it turns out) not understanding it before and amazed myself at how much I was able to absorb in this book by the most abstruse of my favorite authors. But today I read what I wrote eleven years ago after my previous encounter with the book. I appeared to understand even more then and recorded some very smart, very helpful observations. Why didn’t I review what I had written before rereading the book? Chapter 15 would have made so much more sense!

Hmmm. Am I going to share any of those smart, helpful ideas with you, reader? No. Today’s post is only about admitting my intellectual frailty and publicly scolding myself to READ YOUR NOTES!

Suffering

Well, we’ve finished our move. I lost the book I was going to read during the five days it took to travel across the country. Then we had unpacking to do. Then I hurt my back unpacking. So I’ve struggled in the last month to keep up even with reading – which gets interesting on heavy muscle relaxers! Finding opportunities to write for the blog has been almost impossible. It’s actually the end of November as I write this post, but I’m predating it to line up a little better with what I actually read when.

A few years ago while I was visiting the site of the tragedy that made for the bloodiest day in the history of the United States, a park ranger at Antietam National Battlefield recommended Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering. Prof. Faust discusses many aspects of death during and after the Civil War: what soldiers thought of impending death, how they brought themselves to kill, what burials were like, how families mourned, how people on the home front struggled to “realize” (we might say “assimilate”) the death of a beloved father, husband, brother, or son, and how the government took on the duty of accounting for every deceased veteran.

Most interesting to me was the notion of the “good death” so prevalent then in the United States – north and south. Families depended on a loved one’s last words in order to get assurance of the dearly departed’s destiny in the afterlife. Being willing to die, expressing faith, and telling the family that they will all one day reunite on the other side were all good signs that brought endless comfort to the mourning family. Young men were so eager to provide their families with this assurance, they often wrote down their own “last” words before a battle after having a feeling they considered a premonition of death. Following the sudden death of a soldier who had not prepared in this way, comrades often did the best they could to write to the homes of their late messmates with whatever information they had that could be taken as indication of a good death.

So much death, so well written about; the book was bound to be profoundly moving. Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Ranger!

(And could you tell the interpretive ranger at Andrew Johnson National Historic Site that Johnson is consistently ranked by historians near the bottom among other Presidents for a good reason, and that he is not to be ranked “somewhere in the middle”? The President who allowed Black Codes to flourish and virtual slavery to return after the Civil War is certainly not the equal of Coolidge, who balanced the budget after the First World War; Jackson, who kept the country together during Calhoun’s treacherous nullification movement; or Grant, who took down the first Klan.)