A Word In Edgewise: Forewarned Isn’t Always Forearmed

I decided, while monitoring the recent news, to just offer another buffer to what is being touted as reality to fill your idle summer hours. In my universe, that’s books. Emily Dickinson, had she had electronics and viewed similar goings-on, might simply have spat, “Frigate!”

She did, in fact, in a more genteel phrasing and punctuation, penning:

  There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –

Here I offer others I’ve used in the past to take my mind off current affairs, although I now realize that many earlier ages could also have been called “dark.” Perhaps not the cheerer-upper I’d planned. I’ve been called “baleful.” I prefer “realistic,” your choice.

I recently read Miep Gies’s (written with Alison Leslie Gold, 1987) “Anne Frank Remembered.” Those who’ve already read the volume, or who have read Anne’s Diaries know, she was one of Anne’s father’s employees who helped maintain the family in hiding, and who, the world later discovered, was responsible for saving Anne’s pages intact and returning them to Otto after he was freed from Auschwitz.

Gies [her nickname, not her original] was born in Vienna in 1909, a small child who became ever weaker and more fragile through years of food shortages during WWI, and was sent, along with other similarly life-threatened workers’ children, to the far-off Netherlands to be revitalized. A middle-of-the-night arrival; a new name, a new language, a new family. What was supposed to be a three-month stay grew into a lifetime.

And it was there, when the Germans invaded Amsterdam in 1940, that she helped Otto Frank and his family go into hiding above his place of business. One becomes aware that it was on the shoulders of a starving 10-year-old Austrian child, brought by pity to Amsterdam, to be ready decades later to assure Anne Frank’s message of hope was carried into the world after her and her sister Margot’s death in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

If you’re going to work in Los Alamos building the first atomic bomb, it’s a plus to have a sense of humor. Richard Feynman was born with one, and his “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” (1985) is a refreshing read. My high school didn’t even offer physics, so the subtitle of this Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s “Adventures” caught my eye. He had (1918-1988) an eye for the absurd or, more practically, a mind that said, “If this and this are so, then what happens next? Am I being told the whole story by this general/professor/politician?” He played bongo drums and pranks, enjoyed beautiful women but didn’t drink, learned to paint — sold artworks — learned languages as needed, lived a life of curiosity and a curious life.

But he always questioned. At the Trinity Test, July 16, 1945, he and his group, 20 miles out, were handed dark glasses. You wouldn’t see a damn thing, in those, he thought, and got behind a truck windshield, where the UV couldn’t penetrate. The bomb worked. “I had seen it … I’m probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye.”

If you’ve read T.H. White’s wondrous “The Once and Future King” but not his “Mistress Masham’s Repose” (1946), let me urge you to rectify that lapse. It’s about this lonely young girl who … Oh, dear. It, too, seems laden with power-lust, subjugation of the weaker, despotism veiled in a tattered shawl of benevolence. Well, anyway.

Ten-year-old orphan Maria is heiress to Malplaquet, a ruined estate, where she lives with her evil guardians. Exploring an overgrown island in a once ornamental lake, she discovers a colony of Lilliputians, descendants of those kidnapped ages ago during Gulliver’s travels and brought to England. The guardians catch on and want to exploit the tiny people for cash, but before Maria can help, she must look at her own relationship to these tiny citizens of her domain. Despite their diminutive size, they’re not toys; they run a centuries-old society with crops to raise, marriages to enter, children to bear and raise. Human lives to live. Maria has allies, but she must first examine herself — lessons of ethics and autonomy do not come easily.

 Emily adds:

  This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –