Looking Back: What Was I Thinking?
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
8/14/15
 
 
 
This essay is begun on a morning that started with the reading of a long New Yorker piece about the famous Joe Gould and his "Oral History of the World." Known as the longest book ever, it may or may not have existed as such beyond his and others' imagination. The record is mixed.
 
Gould, the story goes, wanted more than anything to write. And write he did. Some of his stuff is extant. It is a weird miscellany wrought by a driven man to what end he seemed not to know or care. He just wanted to write.
 
I had forgotten about Gould, having first learned of him when I was in an undergraduate creative writing seminar many years ago. I was already a writer and writing then for the editor of my hometown weekly gazette and for any other pair of eyes that would take more than a moment to scan my prose.
 
Prof. Elizabeth Hosmer, who taught English literature at the college in those same years, introduced me to the poetry of Alexander Pope wherein I found to my delight this piece of verse and have since applied it to myself:
 
Why do I write? What sin to me
unknown
Dipt me in Ink, my Parents or
my own?/1
 
My penchant for writing surfaced when I was 14 and enamored of newspapers. It is not to be blamed on my parents. It came from a tour of the editorial and composing rooms of the Detroit Free Press in its hot lead days and of the paper's pressroom. I had no press, no type case of my own. Just pencils and paper.
 
Nothing daunted, for gifts to my fellow eighth-grade graduates in 1953, I turned out 15 copies of what I called "The Alden Sun," complete with yellow orbs bookending the nameplate. In three ruled columns I printed with a frequently sharpened No. 2 pencil identical front-page articles for each copy. It was a labor of love but thought more than a little odd by my peers. Yet, years later I learned that the one-off edition was treasured by those who'd saved copies of it.
 
Another early enthusiasm was the railroad that ran through town. I was a permanent fixture at the depot from the time I was eight years old until we moved away when I was 15. Not only did I learn to send and receive messages sent in Morse code. I learned how the railroad operated.
 
By a very generous station agent, I was allowed to report trains in and out to the dispatcher, hand up messages to conductors and engineers, help load and unload baggage and express onto and off of the railcars. As I got older, I was allowed to ride the local freight train all the way to its northern terminus and back. I was permitted to open and close switches, ride in the engine cab and pull the cord for the whistle. So at 15 I was ready for a job on the railroad.
 
That did not mesh well with my other career idea to be a newspaperman. Being fortunate in those days to have had excellent teachers in English composition -- Leonard Bailey, Muriel Neeland and John Young, all now of the past tense -- I was drawn away from the railroad to the writing.
 
Then, having been raised on the Bible, I became in my latter high school days interested in becoming a scholar of its texts. How one accomplished such a thing in those days was by studying for the ministry: four years of college, three or four more in graduate school.
 
Many years into adulthood, when it could be said that I had worked serially for three failing institutions -- the railroad, the church and the newspaper and being then working for one of the latter -- I was back to writing, writing, writing. Tens of thousands of words in a year's time.
 
From my 59th year on, a great many of my words were set down in the pages of eight books, each based on research in which to that time I had been engaged for a considerable term of years. Since 2005, I have published two online essays a week: one of general commentary, the other exegetical analyses of biblical lections appointed for use in masses and other liturgies on the coming weekend.

However, my dream patterns tend to be throwbacks to railroad and newspaper days. In dreams concerning the latter, I am usually casting vile obscenities in the teeth of editors who were threatening to cut or spike my precious copy.

Just one recurrent church dream disturbs my rest from to time. I am always in the pulpit clad only in my underwear, mute and sweating profusely, having forgotten what the sermon was to be.

The railroad dreams are sweeter because I am often in the engineer's seat, hand on the throttle of a locomotive chugging its way along a vaguely familiar right-of-way. I am remembering a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay's paean to travel by rail: ... there isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going. /2

That once was true, but trains of the kind I remember are long gone. I still can write about them, though. I still can write and do write, and not just about trains. Like Pope, I have been Dipt in Ink. And it is my sin alone.


1/ "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot"
2/ "Travel" Second April


Copyright 2015 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 


Readers Write
Re essay of 8/7/15 The Confederate Flag and Donald Trump
 
 
Peter Lawson, Petaluma, California:
You hit the nail on the head with this essay. Paul Krugman's column today [8/7/15 ] is called "From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can't Be Serious" with the subtitle "Donald Trump is fundamentally absurd, but so are his rivals, and that's what their party requires." The article, prescient in the altogether, must have been filed before the debate last night. The article may indicate that the situation isn't much better if any of the 17 candidates get the Republican Party nomination. Isn't it the case that if any of the others is elected we might suffer the same kind of coalition that Hitler had with the Krupps and their compatriots? Trump (or substitute the candidate of your choice) and Kochs and compatriots. Maybe our hope lies in the leftward push that Bernie Sanders is putting on Hillary. Bernie is evoking the same discontents from some of the same folks as Trump. My dismay about all of the political situation is that the most serious issue we need to face is the recent prediction that there will be a ten foot rise in the ocean level by 2050. I put myself to sleep these days by imagining the impact of that 10 feet on the people of New York City and the Bay Area and the migration of all the people in the coastal cities to the countryside. I wrote about the signs of the apocalypse in 2013. I think there has been an exponential growth in that scenario since then. Pray for your grandchildren and love them without reserve.

Donald Worrell, Troy, Michigan:
Well-stated, Harry, as always. Last night's debate was not dissimilar to a clown convention -- with Trump as the head clown, but Huckabee not far behind. I cannot fathom the pandering drivel issuing from the mouths of these absolutely pathetic Republican Presidential wannabes. Trump running as a third party candidate (which I doubt he will actually do) would make Hillary's election inevitable (certainly not disastrous), just as Perot did for [Bill Clinton], and, tragically, Nader did for the [George W.] Bush-Cheney axis of evil. It's frightening, indeed, that in a very real sense the future of the world could one day be in the hands of one of these ragingly inferior, self-serving politicos.
 
Carol Lauhon, Chicago, Illinois: 
To me, your [essays have] always been straightforward in presenting your arguments.That's why your en passant association of Hillary with the Nazis' uber alles registered as a shock.  I was surprised that you took a potshot at Hillary by deploying the enduring stereotype that a powerful woman is a dangerous woman. Anti-Hillary factions are carefully sustaining that stereotype, day by day, aided and abetted by hasty and superficial journalism that gratifies her enemies and creates unease in the most gullible of her supporters. Hillary's strong feminist/populist policy proposals are not being handed to readers on a front-page platter.  What is being served them instead is a daily diet of "scandal," e.g., "Benghazi." The message of "Benghazi" investigators is that they must protect our innocent nation from destruction by a powerful woman who is hiding her guilt. Since Eve, whose stealth and power brought down Paradise, it's always been the woman's fault: Powerful women are dangerous women, and per your column's innuendo, now as dangerous as Hitler. I really don't want to see my favorite blogger's attention diverted that way.

Kimberly Rollins, Columbus, Ohio:
I think you are not at all an alarmist but are, rather, sounding an alarm that all should heed. Where are the giants that used to lead our country? Where are the FDRs and the Harry Trumans and, yes, even Ronald Reagan. The Republican debate last night was a disgrace. Mr. Trump is, indeed, dangerous.

Rabbi Larry Mahrer, Parrish, Florida:
My response is: Right on and AMEN!
 
Cynthia Chase, Laurel, Maryland:
Trump rhymes with Grump and Frump. He seems laughable, hardly worth arguing with, but here he is. YIKES.
 
David Cook, Onalaska, Wisconsin:
As a fellow essayist, I read this one gleefully howling at the plague of metaphors you were unleashing on the Donald, and others. Bravo! Suggesting the similarity of the angry mood of, mostly, older white persons, to those German citizens fed up with the Weimer Republic, was eye opening for the inference of how easily these voters can be manipulated by the likes of a Trump. If you read The Nation you will see a great piece on our governor, Scott Walker, who is every bit as evil and venal as Trump but none of the showbiz glitz.
 
Franklin Driskell, Peru, Indiana:
Alarmist? Was Paul Revere and alarmist? Was Churchill, whom you mention, an alarmist? Was Eisenhower an alarmist when he warned us against the military-industrial complex? Donald Trump is a clown, but a very dangerous clown

Priscilla Major, Evanston, Illinois:
Thank you for speaking for the other half of the "politically mute." I fear that Mr. Trump is going to be trouble in one way or the other. I would support Howard Schultz in an instant if he would run. Elizabeth Warren, too. Why will we have to choose between the rabble the Republicans are putting up and Hillary Clinton

Sheila McKnight, Madison, Wisconsin:
I very much hope you have overstated things with the Trump crowds, but I fear you have actually seen them for what they are. I am very sad about our country right now, to be so vulnerable to the likes of Donald Trump and, for that matter, the others you mentioned. The debates last night were, of course, not debates at all. I have no words to describe what happened on that stage in Cleveland.
 
Karen Davis, Royal Oak, Michigan:
EXCELLENT essay this week. Thank you.
 
Fred Fenton, Concord, California:
What the confederate flag wavers and Donald Trump have in common is dislike of the federal government. The problem for this nation is that growing numbers of people, including well-educated and high-minded types, agree, not with Trump or the confederate flag, but with strong disapproval of Congress. Not one of the declared candidates for president, of either party, has advanced a plan for healing the partisan divide in Washington. Not one of them says how he or she would end the overweening influence of the hoard of lobbyists who buy the votes of our elected representatives and make a mockery of democratic rule. All we get from politicians is empty promises. If Donald Trump is the best truth teller we can find this nation is headed for disaster.  

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at [email protected].