16 June 2010
Great Books
(Great Books, in stack by the bed.)
Time to get out of the Northland. There will be an airplane waiting down in Traverse City, seventy miles away, maybe.
No way to tell, and the contractor who serves the Delta system is a bit cavalier about schedules and the like. Things are more organized out of Detroit, which seems like an oxymoron, but the trick is to get there.
I feel like I always do when I am doing my strategic withdrawal out of he guest house. Each sip of coffee is precious, each glimpse of the gray water of the bay out the window a new revelation of the vastness of the big lake beyond, and the subdued green of the pines marching across the low sand hills.
Halfway to the pole, halfway to the equator from here in the little village. Halfway to no where, which is the way I feel when I am getting ready to pull out.
My pal the Pocket wrote about Northern Michigan in a lyrical poem yesterday. He described running under the pines in the state forest near the old farmhouse in Mesick. The Indian rung of stones, where members of the Odawa band still came each year in his grandfather’s time.
The circle of aunts and cousins in the little towns linked by US-31 and the soft gray skies that open in rain, and then clear out to dazzling blue in the false promise of the summer.
Oh well. Time to go. I wonder if this is the place I was supposed to be all along.
We went to lunch yesterday at the Chinese place next to the Elias Brothers Big Boy at the junction. Mom wanted to show me off to the crowd from her Great Books group. They have been reading the classics together for more than twenty years.
They were an interesting group, nice in the way that people are up here. Couples. A retired Presbyterian minister and his other half. A Scientist and his spouse. The minister found a retirement career editing an anti-immigration magazine for one of the local ideologues. The scientist ran the University research station on one of the little lakes north of here.
Dream job, to be employed up here at Downstate rates and pension.
A visiting niece from the Twin Cities who ran production operations for a regional theater, and for whom the economic downturn has not been kind.
They are contemplating the end of Great Books. You may recall it as a social movement. If I could access the internet here in the Big Top I would be able to carry off the illusion that I actually know something about it, but reaching into the gray mists of memory, I remember Mom going off to discuss a canon of Western Literature with other erudite suburban folks in the 1950s.
The idea, as I understand it, was that there was a body of thought that binds us all together in a common framework and tradition. I don’t know if that is true anymore, or of we are all just drifting off on our own.
The Minister had the Buddha’s delight, a vegetarian dish he prefers at mid-day, since it appears that supper to him is a terra incognita, and he needs to be careful. He waved a fork over he vegetables as he described the first five years of the group, in which they had read all the recommended Great Books, and then struck out on all the other classics.
One of the lesser Conrads had been the topic of discussion that morning, and I glanced at it. Mom had not got around to reading it, what with everything else happening in the house, and I asked if they had considered reading modern literature.
I am in an ad-hoc literature club with a friend in Colorado, and it keeps me on my toes.
The minister nodded gravely, and said expense was an issue. No one on a retirement income felt like shelling out twenty or thirty bucks to read best-sellers, whether they were good or not.
The Niece said her group in Minnesota had a rule that they would only read books that came out in paperback, which was useful since the funding for the theater had started to dry up.
I thanked my lucky stars that for the moment I can read what I want, when I want to, but I realize that things are different up here. Reality is nothing we have to deal with in Washington.
We were paying up and the professor asked me how things were going at home. I said fine, and he shook his head with sadness. The group is about done, he said. Maybe they will come back in September, and maybe they won’t.
I didn’t think he was talking about Great Books, but then, I suppose even the classics have to end sometime.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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