Jack Wilson (20:08)
Okay, we're gonna pause our conversation here to celebrate something in particular about Robert Louis Stevenson, which is the argument that he made or arguments that he made for the importance of reality and imagination for keeping both of those things alive. His reality was that he was in poor health, but his mind stayed vital. His mind stayed open and alive. His taste for adventure was always there. He loved imagining things. And he loved the world of imagination, of invention, of creativity, not just for its own sake, but for the way it transformed reality. This is from a child's garden of verses. In particular, it's from a poem called to a reader as from the house your mother sees you playing round the garden trees. So you may see, if you will look through the windows of this book, another child far, far away. And in another garden play be open. Who's grounded in that poem? The mother. The child is out playing, no doubt in a world of imagination. In Stevensonian terms, the child is the one pulling out a sword and attacking pirates on the deck of a ship right there in the garden. But there's more. The child can come inside when it's time to do so and look into the book. And suddenly the child is the fixed point, the replacement for the mother, the one grounded in reality. Except through the book, the windows of the book, the child can see a different child in a different garden playing. Even if it's raining out, even if you're in bed sick, you have this open to you. You can gaze on that child playing. Now, when the mother does look out the window, the mother probably thinks, oh, does he have his jacket on? It's getting cold. Or is he going to hurt himself climbing that tree? Or maybe the mother has some room in her mind to think he's playing pirate again. When he comes inside, I'm going to talk to him in my pirate voice and tell him he needs to walk the plank or. I remember when I was a little girl playing like that out there. It's important for Stevenson to keep all that alive in our minds. And maybe importance, not the right word. He urges us to do it because it makes life better. Here's a quote from Stevenson's essay the Lantern Bearer. There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life. The fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates. For he had been absent 50 years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments with no more apparatus than an evil smelling lantern. I have evoked him on the naked lynx. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us that fills us with such wonder. When we turn to the pages of the Realist, there, to be sure, we find a picture of life insofar as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears. That which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless, whether we forget. But of the note of that time, devouring nightingale, we hear no news. That's the goal. People seek the nightingale, listen to the nightingale, be transported. And when you do regard the things of the universe, the practical things, the scientific, intangible, the rooted in reality things notice their wondrousness. Here's a poem or another excerpt from a poem from a child's Garden of Verses. This is from the poem My Shadow. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me. And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me, from the heels up to the head, and I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed. The funniest things about him is the way he likes to grow not at all like proper children, which is always very slow, for he sometimes shoots up taller like an India rubber ball, and he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all. Okay, I used to roll my eyes at Poems like that. Okay, fine. But where's the meaning? Remember thinking that even when I was a kid, this is all cutesy and the kind of thing that grownups think kids like. And I think, where's the action? Where's the drama? Where's the plot? I want a con man, or a schemer or a challenge. A mountain climber, or, yes, a pirate. A kidnapping. A man drinking a potion and turning into a monster. But you know what I like? My shadow. It's a pause in life. It's noticing just how amazing shadows are. What else can get so long, so fast and so short? And it's all because of something incredible and something ordinary. The incredible ordinary, like the sun or the moon or the lights of a car passing by. And guess what? Guess what, people. Tomorrow, I, Jack Wilson, am not going to climb a mountain. I'm not going to swashbuckle my way across the Caribbean. I'm not going to drink a potion that will turn me into a monster. And God forbid, I'm not going to be kidnapped. But I will cast a shadow. Will I be open enough to the world to notice it, let alone marvel at it? I don't know. But I know that if I am, and if I do, my day will be that much better than it will be if I'm not. And I don't. Here's another one from Stevenson's collection of poems for children. It's about a train, and it has the rhythms of a train. You can imagine yourself on this train as a child, watching the scenery as it flies past. The poem is called From a Railway Carriage. Faster than fairies, faster than witches. Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches and charging along like troops in a battle. All through the meadows, the horses and cattle all of the sights of the hill and the plain Fly as thick as driving rain and ever again in the wink of an eye Painted stations whistle by. Here is a child who clambers and scrambles all by himself and gathering brambles Here is a tramp who stands and gazes and there is the green for stringing the daisies Here is a cart run away in the road Lumping along with man and load and here is a mill and there is a river each a glimpse and gone forever. Each a glimpse and gone forever. It's life itself. Supercharged again. Will you take the time to notice and celebrate? Being on a train is an amazing thing. Kids know this better than adults do. Once I went to work on the train. The Metro subway here in D.C. and the bus I usually took to the train was broken down and my wife had to load the kids up in the car and come and pick me up at the station. And I came up the escalator and I saw my little ones in the backseat of the car. They were five and two. And the five year old lit up like a Christmas tree, waving at me, so happy to see dad. And my two year old burst into tears. The sight of me made him cry. I got in the car, trying not to be offended, thinking, well, I guess you have fun with your mom all day. But hey, I'm not so bad. I can play games too. I'm a source of fun. But naturally, fortunately, my wife was there to interpret his howls, to translate them for me. And she said, oh, he's mad because I said we were going to pick up dad from the train. And I said, well, that's what you did. And she said, yeah, but he thought we were going to get to see the train. He's mad because he didn't get to see the train. That's why he's upset. And when he saw me, that's when it clicked for him. He was sitting there waiting for a train to come roaring past. When he saw me coming up the little, you know, the little railing of the escalator, he realized there's not going to be a big enormous train that's going to pull up. He won't get to see that. It's just going to be this, this little black railing and that will end me and that will be it. I was no longer offended. This was a kid I knew who sprinted to the window and jumped up onto the couch and stared at a garbage truck going past. And a train is even more majestic than that. One should remember what a miracle a train is. And with Stevenson we're reminded what a miracle it is to ride on a train. All those scenes flashing by like stories, each a glimpse and gone forever. Here's more from Stevenson's essay the Lantern Bearer. The ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory like the lantern. It may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It has so little bond with externals that it may even touch them not. And the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy. In such a case, the poetry runs underground. The observer, poor soul, with his documents, is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment. But he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets to climb after him like a squirrel and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets to find out where joy resides and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation that the excuse for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm phantasmagoric chamber of his brain with the painted windows and the storied wall. End quote. That's where we live. That's where we come alive. There's reality and that's where our bodies are. But our minds are interpreting everything. And we can add a big dose of ourselves to the reality we encounter. Our tastes, our desires, our predilections and our imagination. It's where we live in the warm phantasmagoric chamber of the brain with painted windows and the storied wall. Two more items to drive the point home. And they're quick. Here's a two line poem from a child's garden of verses. The poem is called Happy Thought. The world is so full of a number of things. I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. That's the poem. Yes, we all could be. If we embrace the number of things in this world and how magical they all are and can be, we would be as happy as kings. And finally, because this is the history of literature, let's not forget Stevenson's great quote about reading. Reading. He said, quote, should be absorbing and voluptuous. We should gloat over a book be wrapped clean out of ourselves. End quote. There we have it, people. Somebody early on wrote a negative review of this podcast and said something like, oh, it's just. He's just cheerleading for literature. And as with every negative review, I took it straight to heart. It's why I try not to read any reviews, but people send them to me. They think they're being helpful. Email programs, send me review. Hey, you got another review. And I think, delete, delete, delete, delete. I don't want to read the reviews. Here's what people are saying about you, Jack. And I think, no, please stop sending. I don't need to hear from one person that they're tired of interviews with guests and from the next person that they hate. The host talking. I think. Well, what's left? There's only two things we can do. Silence. But anyway, that review kind of cracked me up. He's cheerleading for literature. Do you want a program about literature where the host hates books? Maybe you do, but that's not going to be me. I'll take my books absorbing and voluptuous, thank you very much. I want to be rapped clean out of myself, too. And then I'll join Stevenson. Not sneering, not scoffing, not sniffing, not dismissing with a bored, cynical stance. I'll read my book, be transported and gloat. Let's take our last break and then hear the second half of our talk with Leo Demroche.
