11 Years Ago Yesterday: Things as they were

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 20, 2009.]

This morning, in that box in the garage, I found the freshman paper of which Vendler’s review had reminded me [“Things as they are,” September 19, 2009]. It was about an inch down in the stack, titled simply “The Necessary Angel.” In the inch above it, I was astonished to find even some papers I’d written in high school. If I needed any documentary evidence that I really did take seriously “the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school,” I’d say that I have found it – I mean more by the fact that I’ve kept the papers than by the fact that I wrote them, for presumably my classmates were writing papers too. But could they, too, today, lay their hands on them?
    Reading “The Necessary Angel” (about 2,000 words) wasn’t a thrill. Dated May 19, 1961, it was written (typed, double-spaced) when I was early into my eighteenth year. No evidence that I was extraordinarily insightful or creative. Not badly written, but definitely a student’s work. And no mention of the passage I quoted last night about reality’s being “things as they are.”
    My kind instructor, Professor James C. Haden, wrote a comment at the bottom (and on the back) of the last sheet that I suppose could have been the main reason I kept the pages:

I am immensely impressed by the subtlety and skill with which you pieced together an overall view of what Stevens was saying or trying to say [emphasis mine] about the nature of poetry. This is a tough job which you have done well. I do wish that you had paused now and then to explore the special meanings which Stevens’ rather poetic utterances gave to such words as reality. This, in effect, is asking yourself why he says just what he does. It is a job worth doing, if only to discover whether or not his view of reality differs in any marked degree from yours. Also, it might have been helpful to look at some of his poetry, to see if it fits his own theoretical pronouncements. [Apparently I had not read any of Stevens’ poems.] So there is still an interesting task ahead of you if you want to undertake it.
    I wish you all luck in your future studies. I have appreciated your thoughtful approach to our work of this year.

In re-reading that as I typed it here, I felt a shiver in my limbs – a shiver at the life I didn’t live because I dropped out of my doctoral degree program in philosophy five and a half years later (and subsequently spent thirty years at IBM), a shiver at the possibility that I might yet undertake Professor Haden’s “job worth doing” and that “interesting task.”

I can begin by reading “The Snow Man,” which I find on p. 8 in my Library of America volume. It was an early poem, published in Stevens’ 1923 collection, Harmonium:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Thank you, Helen Vendler, for the evocative review. And thank you, too, for that television series of about twenty-two years ago about American poets, “Voices & Visions.” I still have my videotape recordings. Watching the Stevens program again will be enjoyable homework.
_______________
[On August 13, 2011, a line was added at the bottom announcing that “I looked in the box again.” It linked to the post “Illustrated limerick.” The title referred to “a faded, wrinkled, blue-lined sheet on which my son had illustrated a delightful limerick that I guess he must have written about 1980, around age twelve – going by the drawing’s similarity to one he did for a usability campaign I was involved in at IBM’s Santa Teresa Laboratory at about that time.”]

Copyright © 2009, 2020 by Moristotle