Memory preserves the past and fixes the imagination.

 

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master—outward sense
The obedient servant of her will. Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood.

— William Wordsworth, The Prelude; Book Twelfth: Imagination and Taste, How Repaired and Restored

Music distills, packages, and holds emotion. — Roger W. Smith

So do precise memories. As Wordsworth well knew.

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I am at freshman football practice. It is a beautiful New England Indian summer. The practices are long and exhausting.

I am probably too small to have gone out for football. We do leg lifts and other exercises on a hot, sweaty day. Drills against a blocking dummy. The freshman squad coach with a green cap, Mr. Strumski, is a heavy set guy.

Another kid, Gary W, says to me, “You think you’re a football player? What did you go out for football for?”

It’s my senior year. English class is first period. I pass the principal’s office on the way to class. I hear someone say to the principal, Mr. Alvino. “How are things going today, Mr. Alvino?” He answers, “I have all sorts of headaches. ______ of my teachers called in sick.”

I am always rushing not to be late for school. Our stately old house on Chapman Street, a prime address in the town, was built in the previous century. We have only a bathtub. I take a bath, gulp down my mother’s breakfast, and race to school through woods, a path leading to the football field, past which is the school–the best way to get there. My hair and clothes are always still wet.

I am at the Oak Crest Inn on Cape Cod. Summer 1964. My first job ever (other than paperboy). My title is Night Clerk. $35 a week plus room and board. I have to make rounds every hour with a watchclock on my shoulder and – in my capacity as night clerk — admit the occasional last minute guest. I have a weighty tome to read; there is usually not that much to do.

At eight a.m., my eleven hours shift is finished. I go to the dining room for breakfast. Leo, a crusty old guy, is the cook. He is always making dirty jokes with the waitresses. They are mostly college students. They have pert, saucy comebacks for him. They regard Leo (justly) as a dirty old man, but don’t mind him. One of the waitresses likes to do things like stick her finger in whipped cream and take a taste of it before delivering a strawberry shortcake to a table. All the waitresses are smart and witty. Leo is a short order cook. I am thankful for his breakfasts: greasy eggs with hash browns. His coffee is terrible.

Then I go up to a garret, a tiny space in the rooftop of the Oak Crest Inn, and crawl into bed, having placed LPs on the portable stereo my parents gave me as a high school graduation present. It is always classical: Beethoven piano sonatas, Schumann’s piano concerto, and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. The music soothes me.

I can’t sleep that long. Wake up in midafternoon –- if not earlier — and head to the beach.

One evening, before my shift, among a gathering in the common room, Mrs. Allingham, a teacher and guest for the whole summer (making her permanent; the hotel is open only during summers) — she is given red carpet treatment, but is never demanding — asks me, could I please get her a cup of coffee.

I panic, There is a full coffee urn at hand, but what is one supposed to put in a coffee cup, how prepare it? I buttonhole another guest and ask them to please help me. Just put some milk and sugar in the cup, they tell me. It’s a relief to me to know.

It is a Monday morning, my first day of work at Columbia University. In the spring of 1973.

In those days, I always had difficulty being on time. I get there precisely at 9 a.m. The door to the Office of Admissions and Counseling, on the fourth floor of Lewisohn Hall, is locked. It is about 9:15 before anyone shows up. Someone arrives and unlocks the door. They seem completely unconcerned. My boss, the Assistant Dean, shows up a few minutes later. He says, something like “good, you’re here,” points out my desk, and goes into his office. He basically ignores me. I am left wondering, what am I supposed to be doing?

Susan S, the receptionist, is very good looking and voluptuous. She is always cheerful and friendly. Sunny disposition. The idiosyncrasies of the others in the office amuse her, but she doesn’t take anything too seriously.

Susan is married to a lawyer who is friendly and unassuming like her. She is pregnant. She invitees me and others to feel her stomach and her child (it turns out to be a girl) moving. Didi, the Financial Aid Officer’s secretary, often brings her daughter to work.

Margaretha, an academic advisor, looks like a Scandinavian movie star. She speaks with a heavy accent (she is Swedish), and Gerry, another advisor who never seems to be busy, can do a very good imitation of her.

The so called professional staff with any sort of title always affect importance.

Nobody dresses that well. Well, most don’t. My boss, the dean, does not look like a businessman, but he is always neat. Dean ______ is always having meltdowns as the result of constant demands from students. and superiors. He calls in sick only rarely, telling me he is “on my bed of pain”; he has a penchant for cliches. On lunch hours, he often goes for a swim in the Teachers College pool. I call it “hydrotherapy,” which amuses him. He lives in the Village, on West 16th Street (he commutes every day uptown on the No. 1 train) and loves the ballet.

It is 1978. I get off the Number 1 train at Times Square and almost sprint the few blocks crosstown to Madison Avenue and 40th Street 270 Madison Avenue to be exact.

I have been hired as a promotion copywriter by a scientific and technical publishing firm. We have to sign in on a timesheet in Eridania’s office. She somehow knows the head of the firm and has a good job as office manager.

Eridania is Puerto Rican. She has handsome features and a charming accent. She is nice and diligent but never seems to have that much to do. Eddie, as she is known, has her own office. So does Mary Ann L., who has connections through her father or husband that make her a pooh-bah. She lives near Sutton Place; her husband is a doctor. She only shows up when she feels like it. The firm is supposed to be publishing scientific and medical books, but she has started up a line of books on ballet. She affects to be arty. She can be hard to take.

There are six or seven desks in the room, which is on an upper floor which the firm occupies.

Inez is from Jamaica. She is Eddie’s secretary. She is very good natured and friendly and is always seeing the humor in things. Gail is someone or other’s secretary. She is loud mouthed — outspoken — says whatever come to mind. She has a sharp wit.

The firm has this supposedly great policy of giving us a half day on Fridays. Actually workdays begin at 8:30, somehow making it the case that we have a couple or more hours coming to us at the end of the week, so the workday ends at 1:30 on Friday. Some of us go to Central Park to play ball. We have joined a softball league. It was Ted’s idea. Ted sells advertising in our medical journals. He works in the same room. He is very handsome and is a good athlete. He just graduated from college. He is young, earnest, and diffident.

Ted’s father is a staff writer for Time magazine. Sometimes he comes to watch our games. We elect Ted team captain and manager.

Around 12 noon, Gail announces that she will get lunch for everyone at a deli on the avenue. She loves fulfilling this duty; takes everyone’s order. Comes back with a cardboard box filled with everything from pizza slices to club sandwiches.

l always order a grilled cheese. The food is never good.

The building has horrible ventilation, is a so called “sick building.” I get a terrible cold. Of course, one can’t open the windows.

People still smoked in those days, I have quit recently, but I occasionally bum a filter cigarette from my immediate superior, Gerry. This always annoys him. He doesn’t hide it, but he proffers a cigarette.

It is memories like these that reconstitute the past for me, bring it back as if it were today or yesterday. Bring the past back exactly as it was; and everything I was experiencing and felt then.

 

— posted by Roger W Smith

  February 2023

“He had been many things. … Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time.”

 

Thirty years of taking-in; fifteen years of giving out; —that, in brief, is Oliver Goldsmith’s story. When, in 1758, his failure to pass at Surgeons’ Hall finally threw him on letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, and the fifteen years had been begun. What was to come he knew not; but, from his bare-walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified past. He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish “buckeen.” He had tried both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither. He had started for London and stopped at Dublin; he had set out for America and arrived at Cork. He had been many things :—a medical student, a strolling musician, a corrector of the press, an apothecary, an usher at a Peckham “academy.” Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his ” forty pounds a year” by farming a field or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting season from the “blue bed to the brown,” and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. As it was, if he could not be said “to have seen life steadily, and seen it whole,” he had, at all events, inspected it pretty narrowly in parts; and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things which, in his turn, he was to impress upon his writings. “No man “—says one of his biographers”*—ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.” To his last hour he was ·drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that “unhallowed time” when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities. To do as Goldsmith did, would scarcely enable a man to write a Vicar of Wakefield or a Deserted Village,—certainly his practice cannot be preached with safety “to those that eddy round and round.” But viewing his entire career, it is difficult not to see how one part seems to have been an indispensable preparation for the other, and to marvel once more (with the philosopher Square) at “the eternal Fitness of Things.”**

— Austin Dobson, Introduction, Poems and Plays By Oliver Goldsmith (Everyman’s Library, 1910)

 

*John Forster, author of The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith.

**A quotation from a fictional character, the philosopher Square, who is parodied in Fielding’s novel Tom Jones.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   February 2023

Staten Island beach walks

 

Sea-cabbage; salt hay; sea-rushes; ooze–sea-ooze; gluten–sea-gluten; sea­-scum; spawn; surf; beach; salt-perfume; mud; sound of walking barefoot ankle in the edge of the water by the sea. — Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume IV: Notes, edited by Edward F. Grier (New York University Press 1984), pg. 1309

 

photographs by Roger W. Smith

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   February 2023

There is a deeper bond in life

I was thinking some more today — musing, as I might say, on “profound” philosophical questions in my favorite pub — about what, in our talks, my departed and sorely missed friend Bill Dalzell — someone whose intuitive ratiocination influenced me greatly (both his way of thinking and the actual thoughts) — communicated implicitly to me about the importance of intuition in cogitation, in decision making, in one’s life course

To put it another way, I was thinking about human relationships

When they work, become meaningful — meaningful and profound — when they endure, it is not because you and the other have worked out and reached an understanding or accommodations on most issues or one another’s views

It is because something deeper and stronger binds you

Call it love or fellow feeling

I have seen it so many times in married couples -– in the bond between my parents, for example

When, to put it simplistically, love and “custom” (lives lived together) mean the most, trump disagreements

I venerate reasoning and acumen in people

I also cherish persons with whom I have achieved something deeper when it comes to relationships. Them and the relationships

There is a deeper bond in life than that of affinity based on commonalities that are supposed to make people compatible. That deep something which binds people who become bonded in all sorts of circumstances and scenarios

 

— Roger W. Smith

  January 2023

Walt Whitman, “Brooklyn Parks”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘Brooklyn Parks’

Posted here (Word document above):

Walt Whitman. “BROOKLYN PARKS”

Brooklyn Daily Times, April 17, 1858

What intrigues me is Whitman’s mention of “a Park on the heights, over Montague ferry!,” whereby he refers to the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, from which there is a splendid view of Manhattan.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   January 2023

 

Brooklyn Heights; photo by Roger W. Smith

Brooklyn Heights; photo by Roger W. Smith

 

Walt Whitman, “I Sit and Look Out”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘I Sit and Look Out’

 

This poem almost needs no commentary. But I would say that its simplicity and lack of affectation – and its directness – are notable..

And that Whitman speaks to me. Personally. To my personal thoughts and observations.

I find myself observing unhappiness and worse in the course of the days and passing time. . Human suffering and degradation that one hears or reads about; and situations that produce such feelings in persons of my acquaintance. And besides suffering, regrets and remorse.

— Roger W. Smith

   January 2022

Walt Whitman, “Philosophy of Ferries”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘Philosophy of Ferries’

Posted here (Word document above):

Walt Whitman “Philosophy of Ferries,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1947

IN The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman; Much of Which Has Been But Recently Discovered, with Various Early Manuscripts; Now First Published; Collected and Edited by Emory Holloway, Volume One, pp. 168-171 (Gloucester, Mass. Peter Smith, 1972)

 

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Things haven’t changed much since Whitman’s day.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   January 2023

 

photo by Roger W. Smith

 

*****************************************************

See also my post

the ferry

the ferry

Walt Whitman, “Broadway”

 

Walt Whitman, ‘Broadway’ (2)

Posted here (Word document above):

Wat Whitman, “BROADWAY”

Life Illustrated, August 9, 1856

an unsigned article attributed to Whitman, reprinted in

New York Dissected By Walt Whitman: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of LEAVES OF GRASS; Introduction and Notes by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Inc. 1936), pp. 119-124

 

*****************************************************

Whitman’s experiences and impressions in his pre-Civil War years are similar to my own in Manhattan jaunts. (I also love to take the ferry.) As noted by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari:

When Moncure D. Conway, at Emerson’s suggestion, called upon Whitman a month or so after the appearance of Leaves of Grass, in 1855, he took a walk with him through the city. “Nothing could surpass,” he says, “the blending of insouciance with active observation in his manner as we strolled along the streets”. … Whitman had been walking the streets, riding the omnibuses and crossing the ferries for many years. His memory was stored with so many such impressions that one of his early manuscripts describes his mind as a picture gallery. Perhaps it was from a desire to reconcile the contradictions in these multiform and inharmonious impressions that the poet sought escape in mystical rhapsody. The peculiar quality of Whitman’s elevated poetic mood, however, is due to the fact that instead of withdrawing his mind ascetically from experience, he sought rather to use definite concrete experiences to climb to a summit of vision which would embrace them all.

— posted by Roger W. Smith

January 2022

 

Broadway

 

Broadway

 

A friend of mine from Europe said in a message that he hoped to visit New York sometime and would love to see “Broadway Avenue.” I wrote him back with some facts.

I am attaching an explanatory Word document (above) and photos I have taken in my walks.

My photos show Broadway near Wall Street and Broadway way uptown; it goes from the southernmost to the northernmost point (218th Street) of Manhattan.

— Roger W. Smith

  January 2023

 

photos by Roger W. Smith

Broadway and Rector Street, Financial District

Times Square

Broadway and 156th Street, Upper Manhattan

Washington Heights

Inwood

Broadway and 218th Street