#782 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday October 27)
Good morning,
LITERATURE
I was lucky enough to have built a friendship with Jack Hubbard, the president of USC during my tenure there. Jack was a man of the world—a scholar, an ambassador, a soldier, and a thinker.
Jack shared Ernest Hemmingway’s view that Huckleberry Finn represents arguably the greatest American novel and is the taproot from which all great American novels descend. That it confronted the issue of slavery, presented the entire story in the Southern vernacular, and presented its story through the eyes of a boy evolving before our eyes made it groundbreaking. Jack used to say he re-read Huck Finn every five years since he first picked it up in his youth. It was a different book each time, he would say.
The greatest moment in the book is when Huck realizes that Jim, the runaway slave and Huck’s erstwhile traveling companion, besides being at great risk, is a man—possessing all the rights that accrued to Huck, and that society is fundamentally corrupt. He is taught that helping a runaway slave will send him to hell. He writes a letter that will disclose Jim’s whereabouts to his owners. Yet, he has a change of heart and rips up the letter, concluding:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
And in that moment, both young Huck Finn, young Jack Hubbard and young Glenn Sonnenberg grew up and developed a greater understanding of the world and our place in the world than before that moment.
Books on the Wall states the power of this sentence better than I can:
“These seven words…are amongst the most memorable in American literature.
At this point in the novel, Huck Finn has just realized the Duke and Dauphin have betrayed the runaway slave Jim and sold him into captivity. Jim will be transported back to Miss Watson if Huck Finn stands idly by.
…Huck decides to tear it up and save Jim. Rather than listening to society’s warning that helping runaway slaves will lead to eternal damnation, Huck follows his gut instinct and makes one of the most important moral decisions of his life.”
It is through books like this—currently banned in many school districts and public libraries in America—that great ideas are articulated to youth and social change can occur.
POETRY
It’s not Mother’s Day, but it always bears noting what we owe our parents for raising us, often with less recognition than they deserved. Thus, this Billy Collins classic:
THE LANYARD
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Have a great day,
Glenn