Book published 1985

Dissertation completed 1981

Dissertation started 1966

A plenary lecture to “Literature and the Arts in Western Culture.”

Stanford University March 11 1985

I first came across Candide when I was seventeen, the age of its protagonist  at the beginning of   the story.  I can remember that simple title staring out at me from the spine of a thin volume  on  the  musty shelves of Baron 1 s, the used bookstore that I frequented with my sidekick Weiskopf  on  Friday  afternoons–after  our  last  High  School  class  and before we took the subway downtown to hear music at Jazz on the Wagon,  the one place in Greenwich  Village you  could get  into without I.D.

I had heard the name Candide before; it was known in the grapevine as one of those books–intellectual, bohemian and intimate–that our parents wouldn 1 t approve of, books with titles like You Can’t Go Home Again, On the  Road,  Howl  and  The  Catcher  in  the  Rye.   I  slipped  the  book  down from the shelf, noticed the “privately printed” inscription, the mannered art-nouveau illustrations of thin bare-breasted girls, the sixty cent price, and I took it to the register.

From the opening sentence,  I was entranced.   Here was another Holden Caulfield, still a sincere, naive and gentle child, cruelly punishe9 for simply following  his  natural  desires,  abruptly  booted from a secure nest in what was just beginning to feel like Paradise, and set adrift in a human jungle of repression, hypocrisy, violence and greed.  I could relate to that heavy tale–especially since it moved along so lightly, with a little sex and a lot of laughs on almost every page.  I too felt adrift in a world of wandering  hands  and  kicks in the backside, of atmospheric H-bomb tests and classroom  shelter drills, of Anne Frank and  Joe McCarthy.

I finished reading the book at two in the morning on the Staten Island ferry, where we would ride back and forth across New York harbor when the jazz club was too crowded. Thereafter, Candide became another one of those few voices which confirmed my adolescent sense that I lived in a pretty screwed up place-despite the assurances of Doris Day, Dwight Eisenhower and Dr. Norman Vi.11cent Peale that middle-class America was indeed the best of all possible worlds. (more…)

On American Airlines flight 510 to Kent Ohio

For two days I’ve been shopping and packing, provisioning for this expedition: 10 copies of a résumé, my article in progress, financial statement on Laurel tree care, family picture, three piece suit, hiking boots, dissertation, Index cards.  My excitement has intensified since the Monday night phone message from the Davey Tree Company which said “we want you to come spend a week at corporate headquarters in Ohio as soon as possible.” Rescue and opportunity!

I sought out this company and this field of work both out of desperation and hope. The academic career I qualified for had dead ended again while working with trees is “a path with heart.” Since the termination of Jan’s job as Dean at Scripps College,  the support of the family shifts to me. She needs the kind of space she has provided me, and someone must supply the family with peanut butter and running shoes. (more…)

[Published in the Western Chapter News of the International Society of Arboriculture, March 1983]

Readers of The Western Chapter News may be interested in two remarkable tree books published in recent years but not reviewed in the trade journals. They are Trees by Andreas Feininger (New York: Penguin, 1978, $9.94) and The Tree by John Fowles and Frank Horvat (New York: Little Brown, 1980, $24.95). Large formatted and lavishly produced, both books combine stunning photographs with informative, provocative and beautifully written texts. Their authors enjoy worldwide artistic reputations: Feininger exhibits in major museums and has published numerous other photographic studies; Fowles is a best-selling British novelist, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Horvat is an eminent French landscape photographer.

Though none of these artists is a tree professional, their work displays extensive knowledge; more important, it expresses the kind of lifelong respect and affection for trees that lies at the heart of the arborist’s vocation. Like truly skilled tree work itself, these books represent a labor of love, an outpouring of praise, and and application of human art inspired by the art of nature. By deepening awareness of the value and meaning of trees, the authors hope ultimately not only to enrich human experience but also to save trees and forests from the wanton destruction to which they are still subjected.

In his introduction to Trees, Feininger states that he has created

…a new kind of book not a text nor a manual
nor a tree identification book, nor still another book proving
trees are beautiful, but a tree appreciation book.

In fact both these books promote tree appreciation in similar ways. First is through simple presentation. By selecting, composing and framing each tree portrait, the photographer brings forward aesthetic qualities–qualities of strength and fragility, of symmetry and variation, of balance and tension–that normally pass unobserved. Recalling Feininger’s shot of the massive central trunk of a twisted oak in a German park, I stop my morning run to admire the gnarly Quercus agrifolia in my neighbor’s yard. Or stuck in freeway traffic, I flash on Horvat’s portrait of the Wych Elm silouetted by a January mist, and suddenly I’m greeted with the sight of an Ulmus americana arching its limbs over an Arco station.

Appreciation of trees is also fostered by these books’ focus on detail. They slow and thereby enrich our perceptions of pattern, texture and light: Horvat’s row of pollarded sycamore crowns, Feininger’s mulberry leaves outlined black against the white sky, or his sweetgum leaves outlined against the dark background foliage. In such treatments of detail, the artist’s gift emerges. For while a lengthy series of photographs of bark in a tree identification book becomes schematic and dull, Feininger’s seventeen-shot sequence on trunks manages to build steadily to a dramatic visual climax. Each full-page portrait varies light, camera angle, distance, background and composition, delighting us with the variety contained in repetition. (more…)

5

The Backstretched Connexion:

Youth and Age

in The Shepheardes Calender

This chapter proposes an interpretation of The Shepheardes Calender which places the debate of youth and age at the work’s core. Spenser used both the thematic content and the formal structure of this minor bucolic convention as the central shaping principle of his major pastoral work. Such emphasis was particularly appropriate, first because pastoral’s rural settings on the periphery of civilization correspond to the peripheral states of the human life cycle, and second, because pastoral’s projection of dual worlds inspires debate-like comparisons of perception and judgment.

But Spenser did not simply reprocess these essential elements of the pastoral tradition. Rather he modified and enriched his conventional models by disclosing the debate of youth and age through the viewpoint of a narrative persona, a viewpoint which shifts in the course of the poem from identification with youth to identification with age. That is to say, Spenser used the pastoral debate of youth and age as a means by which to externalize the inner conflicts of past and future, of regression and maturation, endemic to adolescence. By patterning his series of eclogues with a phased succession of such debates, Spenser allowed the reader to participate in the reversal of perspective that constitutes the subjective transformation of boy into man. Moving from premises about the psychology of pastoral and about the philosophy of debate laid down previously, this chapter arrives at the conclusion that The Shepheardes Calender–a product of its author’s youth and addressed to youthful readers-has as its deepest unifying subject the life stage of youth itself. (more…)

I had been feeding the pigs extra ration all week to use up what was left of the Hog Grower. They sounded even angrier than usual on Saturday morning, when I didn’t stop at their pen on my round of chores. By the time I finished rinsing the milk strainer, Jonah had already belted himself into the front seat of the car.

I floored the accelerator for the five mile trip down the highway to his friend Jimmy Cox’s house, where I had arranged for him to spend the day. The inside of “the wagon wheel place” felt strange to me, its walls lined with trophies and racks of guns.

Back home, 1 started preparing. I redug the old fire^–pit in the backyard, split a good sized pile of dry cedar and alder, and scoured out the forty gallon drum. I set the drum over the pit, staked at a 45 degree angle against the heavy work table, so that we would be able to dip and pull while scraping the hides. As water from the hose slowly filled the drum, I kindled the fire. Then I went over to the collapsing root cellar and sawed off two maple branches growing through its roof. I sharpened them at both ends to make spreading sticks and placed them on the table next to the coiled ropes, the pile of folded gunny sacks, the whetted knives and the .22.

I was feeling anxious, but more focused than usual. I had to be ready by 11:00 o’clock, when Terry Kurtz, my experienced neighbor, was coming over to help out. As I had explained to our visitor from the city a few days earlier, slaughtering animals no longer disturbs me, as long as the process is carried out with order, precision and respect for the animal’s gift. (more…)

Last night: The Seventh Seal at the College, followed by Roy and Eileen’s wedding reception at Lund.  Neil walked up while I was eating smoked salmon and drinking champagne and told me that it was Kol Nidre evening.  This morning I decided to fast and pray, but first a furious cleanup of Jonah’s room and the bedroom.

I dug out the bag of Tfillin I received at my Bar Mitzvah.  The blue velvet covered with dust and mold, the zipper seized with rust, the leather inside cracked and twisted, a hole worn through the gold embroidered star of David.  It was left under a leak in the cooler for two years.  Inside a stained piece of paper with Aunt Marta’s history of the Wertheimer family back five generations: “Steven Marx, great grandson of daughter Rose of Baruch Loeb Wertheimer, wife Jeannette, is Professor at Columbia University.”

Last night at the reception, June urged me to write and stop mucking around with distractions like theatre.  A dream recurrent: I’m in a cafeteria line, very anxious.  I have several classes to attend during my senior year.  I have an excellent record but I haven’t been to these last required classes in a long time.  I forget what the courses are, what the assignments, don’t know what the consequences will be, they may be terrible.  I wake up unhappy.

The crankiness and stomach pains from fasting have passed into a slow passive contentment like that I felt after the Gestalt group in the tipi. Reading prayer book, beating breast, dubbining the Tfillin straps and taping up the boxes, unsure of what’s inside. Jan comes home and I work with her canning tomatoes.

Prospering, prospering: joy, peace, snug warmth.  Reading, drinking tea, sleeping, meditating on the saggy sofa by the stove.  The Ashley works better all the time.  Last night it burned 8 hours and still had three logs going this morning. The ceiling over the kitchen insulated with blankets of pink fiberglass, the holes in the floor chinked, curtains over the windows in the living room.  The house is getting tighter, cleaner.  And yesterday, unpacking woolies and a forgotten old tenor recorder and boxes of books from behind the eaves.  And Jan and Jonah making a chocolate cake.  And Janet and Martin coming to interview us about the adoption and Chantelle LeDuc playing with Jonah in the bath and upstairs.

I prepared salmon dinner and invited Janet and Martin to stay–they did–then went off to rehearsal.  It’s coming together [Free to Be You and Me] and I begin to really enjoy the play.

The moon and stars are brilliant.  Tonight is potluck dinner with our coop collective.  This morning I ran the drain from sink and bathtub to the barnyard so Jan and Jeanne will have running water during the freeze.

The wind gusts, the stove taps lightly, the mixed-in sticks of green alder hiss, the drdaft whistles low and cheerful.  The snow falls, sometimes in rare flakes, sometimes in thick clouds.  Out the window, black and white and red and green.