Looking Back: What Was I Thinking?
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
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