10-second review: As an adult, the author reflects on his Kiowa Indian culture as he experienced it through his grandmother in his youth. The love of the sun and of nature stands out.
Quote: “My grandmother had died….and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.” p. 313.
Quote: “The aged visitors who came to my grandmother’s home when I was a child were made of lean and leather and they bore themselves upright.” p. 317.
Quote: “The walls have closed in upon my grandmother’s house….. I saw for the first time in my life how small t was. It was late at night, and there was a white moon, nearly full. I sat for a long time on the stone steps by the kitchen door.” p. 318.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: Reflections on the themes that emerged through writing his autobiography.
Quotes:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
“Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between.”
“Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.”
Comment: A succinct summary of life. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: The best summary of "Camp" is in the last sentence: "It's good because it's awful." An attempt by the author to define the indefinable. Could serve as a model.
Quotes:
“Taste has no system and no proof.”
“Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated.”
“The thing as pure artifice.”
“The hallmark of camp is the spirit of extravagance.”
“Camp…incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over extravagance.”
“Style is everything….”
“…that there exists…a good taste of bad taste.”
“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment....”
Comment: Still don't understand "camp"? Read the essay. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: Father visits his college-dropout son, living like a hippie, to try to talk sense into him, but his language, almost unintelligible in its use of middle-class, middle-aged metaphors, is incapable of being understood by his son whose point of view is completely different from his dad's. The two see the world differently, summarized by the father's final comment to the narrator as they leave the son's "pad" to take a taxi: "You tell me," he says. "What could I say to him? I couldn't say anything to him. I threw out everything I had. I couldn't make anything skip across the pond. None of them. Not one."
That is, not one of his reasons, hidden by his own metaphors, for wanting his son to return to respectable middle-class life made sense to his son.
Comment: He might have tried plain English. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: In a letter that I think is as eloquent as anything I have ever read, King responds to white clergymen who criticize him for engaging in nonviolent peaceful protest that results in violence and who urge black people to wait patiently while white society adjusts to accept them. King quotes Aquinas, St. Augustine and Martin Buber. He uses scathing logic. He uses plain statement of the treatment of blacks by whites. His message is, Why are not you, the white religious Christians, joining us in the march to justice n behalf of your black brothers to fulfill the Constitutional guarantees for its citizens? Unforgettable.
Quotes:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
“Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”
“..when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are)….”
“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over….”
“There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’ ”
“An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself.”
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
“In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery?”
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
“…forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
“The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice….”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: The author reflects on the life of Washington Woodward who could do anything on his farm, but whose life was wasted on moving rocks and saving old, used nails and talking about every detail of his experience. The author seems to conclude that the activities of Washington Woodward's life had no value to anyone. It was a full life, but it had no social significance. Seems to suggest that the traditional, individualistic, New Hampshire way of life was no longer relevant in the modern world.
Quote: “Many of my grandfather’s stories were symptoms, to me and not to him, of the decay of New Hampshire.”
Quote: “The best thing about him [Washington Woodward] was his pride in good work…. I knew him to shoe a horse, install plumbing, dig a well, make a gun, build a road, lay a dry stone wall, do the foundation and frame of a house, invent a new kind of trap for beavers, manufacture his own shotgun shells, grind knives and turn a baseball bat on a lathe.”
Quote: “He saved the nails because it was a sin to allow good material to go to waste.”
Quote: “He saved nails and wasted life.”
Comment: Maybe the modern world is what is irrelevant. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: Author talks about her love of reading series books. She discovers that the volumes that follow are not as good as the first. Then she discovered 24 volumes of Mark Twain, each book different. She had outgrown formulas for writing.
Quote: “It seemed to me when I had finished that, the last nine of those books weren’t as good as the first one. And the same went for all Series Books. As long as the are keeping a series going, I was afraid, nothing can really happen. The whole thing is one grand prevention.”
Quote: “And then I went again to the home shelves and my lucky hand reached and found Mark Twain—twenty-four volumes, not a series, and good all the way through.”
Comment: Seems to me that reading series books is a phase that good readers go through on the way to becoming life-long readers. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
People and animals cling to memories and to places that have since changed--a department store replaces a field that once was tenanted by insects, birds, rodents and rabbits. The elevated goes underground and pigeons who used to be fed at its stations find the food they counted on gone. People and animals cling to the memories of what once was.
Quote: “Then I came to a sign which informed me that this field was to be the site of a new Wanamakers suburban store. Thousands of obscure lives were about to perish….and the bodies of little white-footed mice would be crunched under the inexorable wheels of the bulldozers.”
Comment: Animals and people return to places that are no longer there. As Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” If you haven’t read Loren Eiseley’s essays, you need to purchase them at Amazon. They are almost an addiction to readers who are sensitive to the natural world around us. He is a scientist with a poet’s powers of observation. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
Essay: “Notes of a Native Son.” James Baldwin. 1955.
Ten-second review: Baldwin struggles with his hatred of whites. He recognizes that hatred is self-destructive, and concludes that he must accept life and people as they are, without rancor. But he is resolute that he will not stop fighting injustice.
Quotes:
“…that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.”
“There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood.”
“…that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my heart.”
“Then I remembered our fights which had been the worst possible kind because my technique had been silence.”
“…and Harlem exploded.”
“…the Negro’s real relation to the white American.”
“Hatred which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law!”
Comment: The Negro’s hatred for American whites is raw in the words of James Baldwin. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: The shore brings land and sea together. The author reflects on the interaction of the two.
Quote: “The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.”
Comment: An almost mystic experience. Rays.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: The author tells how she reluctantly becomes engaged in a conversation about Jews with a prejudiced military man. He thinks because of her Irish name that he can safely say whatever he wants about Jews. He doesn't like them. The author waits until the colonel is about to depart again on the train to tell him that she is married to a Jew.
Quotes: “Don’t start anti-Semitic talk before making sure there are no Jews present.”
“ ‘Oh, hell,’ said the colonel easily. ‘I can tell a Jew.’ ”
“ ‘No, you can’t,’ I retorted, thinking of my Jewish grandmother, for by Nazi criteria I was Jewish.’ ”
Comment: A case study of a prejudiced mind and the futility of trying to change it with arguments based on logic. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-minute review: An assessment of where we human beings are in the history of our existence in the world, with the atomic bomb the symbol of humanity's willful desire for self-destruction. But it may not be a world completed and, in the future, we could make a world in which its fragmented nature of today will be put together with some sense of meaning.
Quote: “…but on the visible evidence, we must admit that in human nature, the spirit of contradiction more than holds its own. Mankind has always built a little more than he has hither to been able or willing to destroy; got more children than he has been able to kill; invented more laws and customs than he had any intention of observing; founded more religions than he was able to practice or even to believe in; made, in general, many more promises than he could keep; and he has been known more than once to commit suicide through mere fear of death.” p. 196.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: The origin of Bop, from the noise a cop's nightstick makes on a Negro's head because he's black. Whites cannot understand Bop since they haven't been beaten about the head because they are white.
Quotes: Where does be-bop come from? “From the police beating Negroes’ heads….. Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club that old club says, ‘Bop! Bop!...Be-bop! … Mop! …Bop!That’s why so many white folks don’t dig Bop…. White folks do not get their heads beat just for being white. But me—acop is liable to grab me almost any time and beat my head—just for being colored.” ………. “A black man shall see dark days. Bop comes out of them dark days. That’s why real Bop is mad, wild, frantic, crazy—and not to be dug unless you’ve seen dark days, too. The folks who ain’t suffered much cannot play Bop, neither appreciate it.” ………. “…beat out of somebody’s head! That’s what Bop is.”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
One-minute review: "One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique, the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340 degrees F., and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble. The Jiffy-Cloz, procurable at any department store or neighborhood insane asylum, consists of half a dozen gigantic sheets of red cardboard, two plywood doors, a clothes rack, and a packet of staples. With these is included a set of instructions mimeographed in pale-violet ink, fruity with phrases like 'Pass section F through slot AA, taking care not to fold tabs behind washer (See Fig. 9).' The cardboard is so processed that as the subject struggles convulsively to force the staple through, it suddenly buckles, plunging the staple deep into his thumb."
Quote: “ ‘Now don’t start making excuses,’ she whined. ‘It’s just a simple cardboard toy. The directions are on the back.’ ”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
Ten-second review: As an adult, the author returns to the Maine lake where he had spent his childhood summers. He is with his children. He feels the years slipping away. Everything is the same as when he was a child. Almost. Outboard motors are an irritant. And as he watches his young son, he has a premonition of his own death.
Quotes: “I began to sustain the illusion that he [his son] was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father.” p. 180.……….
“I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture.” p. 180. ……….
“…saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there have been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor….” p. 186.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: Learning to live in a white man's world, a world of unspeakable cruelty. No wonder Richard Wright and other blacks who endured this cruelty were bitter. This essay is raw with vivid stories and inspires hatred for the Southern whites.
Quote: “Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this, the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.” p. 166.
Comment: The brutality of the black experience told by those who lived it needs to be repeated or read if ever we are able to fulfill Martin Luther King’s dream of the table of brotherhood. Whites have to understand what African-Americans lived with. I chose not to use some of the more graphic stories in my quote. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
Quote: “At any rate, it has come about that so-called civilized man finds himself today surrounded by the myriad mechanical devices of a technological world…. Still others attribute the whole menace of the machine to sex….”
Comment: Now that line will get your attention. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
