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AP Language Essay Readings
On Keeping a Notebook
Joan Didion
That woman Estelle,'" the note reads, "'is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated
today.' Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. August Monday morning."
Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me. I study it for a long while.
At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the
bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a
train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?), but I do remember being there. The woman in the
dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper had come down from her room for a beer, and the bartender had heard
before the reason why George Sharp and she were separated today. "Sure," he said, and went on
mopping the floor. "You told me." At the other end of the bar is a girl. She is talking, pointedly, not to
the man beside her but to a cat lying in the triangle of sunlight cast through the open door. She is
wearing a plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck, and the hem is coming down.
Here is what it is: the girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city,
leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m.
long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming
mornings left in August (1960? 1961?). Because she must go directly from the train to lunch in New
York, she wishes that she had a safety pin for the hem of the plaid silk dress, and she also wishes that
she could forget about the hem and the lunch and stay in the cool bar that smells of disinfectant and
malt and make friends with the woman in the crepe-de-Chine wrapper. She is afflicted by a little selfpity, and she wants to compare Estelles. That is what that was all about.
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to
remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is
easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive
one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way
that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my
daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life
presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are
a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children
afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that
I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. She returned the tablet to me a
few years ago; the first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in
the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she
would die of the heat before lunch. I have no idea what turn of a five-year-old's mind could have
prompted so insistently "ironic" and exotic a story, but it does reveal a certain predilection for the
extreme which has dogged me into adult life; perhaps if I were analytically inclined I would find it a
truer story than any I might have told about Donald Johnson's birthday party or the day my cousin
Brenda put Kitty Litter in the aquarium.
So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual
record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for
reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to
keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on
those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me
that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about "shopping, typing piece, dinner with
E, depressed"? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this "E" depressed, or was I
depressed? Who cares?
In fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry; instead I tell what some would call
lies. "That's simply not true," the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against
my memory of a shared event. "The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn't
that way at all." Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing
between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the
distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father
came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day's pattern to lend
verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day's events did
not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all
over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in
family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in
Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground
hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me,
and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself
about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything
observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems
drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed
to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be,
a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue
overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows
his hat check to another and says, "That's my old football number"); impressions of Bettina Aptheker
and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy ("Mr. Acapulco") Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums
and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a
lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for
ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day
of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether It was snowing outside.
I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no
real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check, counter in Pavillon; in fact I
suspect that the line "That's' my old football number" touched not my own imagination at all, but
merely some memory of something once read, probably "The Eighty-Yard Run." Nor is my concern
with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in
the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are
by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing.
("You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it," Jessica Mitford's governess would
hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only
recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only
the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with
memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near
Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite
dresses, other people's trout.
And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see
around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable
"I." We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a
structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something
private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with
meaning only for its maker.
And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning. There does not seem to be, for
example, any point in my knowing for the rest of my life that, during 1964, 720 tons of soot fell on
every square mile of New York City, yet there it is in my notebook, labeled "FACT". Nor do I really
need to remember that Ambrose Bierce liked to spell Leland Stanford's name "£eland $tanford" or that
"smart women almost always wear black in Cuba," a fashion hint without much potential for practical
application. And does not the relevance of these notes seem marginal at best?:
In the basement museum of the Inyo County Courthouse in Independence, California, sign
pinned to a mandarin coat: "This MANDARIN COAT was often worn by Mrs. Minnie S.
Brooks when giving lectures on her TEAPOT COLLECTION."
Redhead getting out of car in front of Beverly Wilshire Hotel, chinchilla stole, Vuitton bags
with tags reading:
MRS LOU FOX
HOTEL SAHARA
VEGAS
Well, perhaps not entirely marginal. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks and her
MANDARIN COAT pull me back into my own childhood, for although I never knew Mrs. Brooks and
did not visit Inyo County until I was thirty, I grew up in just such a world, in houses cluttered with
Indian relics and bits of gold ore and ambergris and the souvenirs my Aunt Mercy Farnsworth brought
back from the Orient. It is a long way from that world to Mrs. Lou Fox's world, where we all live now,
and is it not just as well to remember that? Might not Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks help me to remember
what I am? Might not Mrs. Lou Fox help me to remember what I am not?
But sometimes the point is harder to discern. What exactly did I have in mind when I noted down
that it cost the father of someone I know $650 a month to light the place on the Hudson in which he
lived before the Crash? What use was I planning to make of this line by Jimmy Hoffa: "I may have my
faults, but being wrong ain't one of them"? And although I think it interesting to know where the girls
who travel with the Syndicate have their hair done when they find themselves on the West Coast, will I
ever make suitable use of it? Might I not be better off just passing it on to John O'Hara? What is a
recipe for sauerkraut doing in my notebook? What kind of magpie keeps this notebook? "He was born
the night the Titanic went down." That seems a nice enough line, and I even recall who said it, but is it
not really a better line in life than it could ever be in fiction?
But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the
woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it. We were on her terrace by the sea, and we were
finishing the wine left from lunch, trying to get what sun there was, a California winter sun. The
woman whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down wanted to rent her house, wanted to
go back to her children in Paris. I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a
month. "Someday you will," she said lazily. "Someday it all comes." There in the sun on her terrace it
seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black
snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout
clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. "He left me no
choice," she said over and over as she the punched the register. "He has a little seven-month-old baby
by her, he left me no choice." I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition,
but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to
own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover.
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of
mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to
be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise
us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted
them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought
we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what
we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one
of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to
know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to
Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still
have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise
the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of
trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of
aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to
hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition
all the more insistent for being so long banished.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are
all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your
notebook will never help me, nor mine you. "So what's new in the whiskey business?" What could that
possibly mean to you? To me it means a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit sitting with a couple of fat men
by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Another man approaches, and they all regard one another in
silence for a while. "So what's new in the whiskey business?" one of the fat men finally says by way of
welcome, and the blonde stands up, arches one foot and dips it in the pool looking all the while at the
cabana where Baby Pignatari is talking on the telephone. That is all there is to that, except that several
years later I saw the blonde coming out of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York with her California
complexion and a voluminous mink coat. In the harsh wind that day she looked old and irrevocably
tired to me, and even the skins in the mink coat were not worked the way they were doing them that
year, not the way she would have wanted them done, and there is the point of the story. For a while
after that I did not like to look in the mirror, and my eyes would skim the newspapers and pick out only
the deaths, the cancer victims, the premature coronaries, the suicides, and I stopped riding the
Lexington Avenue IRT because I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years the man with the seeing-eye dog, the spinster who read the classified pages every day, the fat girl who
always got off with me at Grand Central - looked older than they once had.
It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. I was on Fire Island
when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the
sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the
sauerkraut again last night and it did not make me feel any safer, but that is, as they say, another story.
(1966), in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, London: Andre Deutch.
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Elements of Literature Course 5
Straw Into Gold: The Metamorphosis of the Everyday
Sandra Cisneros
When I was living in an artists’ colony in the south of France, some fellow Latin-Americans who taught at the
university in Aix-en-Provence invited me to share a home-cooked meal with them. I had been living abroad
almost a year then on an NEA grant, subsisting mainly on French bread and lentils so that my money could last
longer. So when the invitation to dinner arrived, I accepted without hesitation. Especially since they had promised
Mexican food.
What I didn’t realize when they made this invitation was that I was supposed to be involved in preparing the
meal. I guess they assumed I knew how to cook Mexican food because I am Mexican. They wanted specifically
tortillas, though I’d never made a tortilla in my life.
It’s true I had witnessed my mother rolling the little armies of dough into perfect circles, but my mother’s family is
from Guanajuato; they are provincianos, country folk. They only know how to make flour tortillas. My father’s
family, on the other hand, is chilango from Mexico City. We ate corn tortillas but we didn’t make them.
Someone was sent to the corner tortilleria to buy some. I’d never seen anybody make corn tortillas. Ever.
Somehow my Latino hosts had gotten a hold of a packet of corn flour, and this is what they tossed my way with
orders to produce tortillas. Así como sea. Any ol’ way, they said and went back to their cooking.
Why did I feel like the woman in the fairy tale who was locked in a room and ordered to spin straw into gold? I
had the same sick feeling when I was required to write my critical essay for the MFA exam—the only piece of
noncreative writing necessary in order to get my graduate degree. How was I to start? There were rules involved
here, unlike writing a poem or story, which I did intuitively. There was a step by step process needed and I had
better know it. I felt as if making tortillas—or writing a critical paper, for that matter—were tasks so impossible I
wanted to break down into tears.
Somehow though, I managed to make tortillas—crooked and burnt, but edible nonetheless. My hosts were
absolutely ignorant when it came to Mexican food; they thought my tortillas were delicious. (I’m glad my mama
wasn’t there.) Thinking back and looking at an old photograph documenting the three of us consuming those
lopsided circles I am amazed. Just as I am amazed I could finish my MFA exam.
I’ve managed to do a lot of things in my life I didn’t think I was capable of and which many others didn’t think I
was capable of either. Especially because I am a woman, a Latina, an only daughter in a family of six men. My
father would’ve liked to have seen me married long ago. In our culture men and women don’t leave their father’s
house except by way of marriage. I crossed my father’s threshold with nothing carrying me but my own two feet.
A woman whom no one came for and no one chased away.
To make matters worse, I left before any of my six brothers had ventured away from home. I broke a terrible
taboo. Somehow, looking back at photos of myself as a child, I wonder if I was aware of having begun already
my own quiet war.
I like to think that somehow my family, my Mexicanness, my poverty, all had something to do with shaping me
into a writer. I like to think my parents were preparing me all along for my life as an artist even though they didn’t
know it. From my father I inherited a love of wandering. He was born in Mexico City but as a young man he
traveled into the U.S. vagabonding. He eventually was drafted and thus became a citizen. Some of the stories he
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has told about his first months in the U.S. with little or no English surface in my stories in The House on Mango
Street as well as others I have in mind to write in the future. From him I inherited a sappy heart. (He still cries
when he watches Mexican soaps—especially if they deal with children who have forsaken their parents.)
My mother was born like me—in Chicago but of Mexican descent. It would be her tough street-wise voice that
would haunt all my stories and poems. An amazing woman who loves to draw and read books and can sing an
opera. A smart cookie.
When I was a little girl we traveled to Mexico City so much I thought my grandparents’ house on La Fortuna,
number 12, was home. It was the only constant in our nomadic ramblings from one Chicago flat to another. The
house on Destiny Street, number 12, in the colonia Tepeyac would be perhaps the only home I knew, and that
nostalgia for a home would be a theme that would obsess me.
My brothers also figured greatly in my art. Especially the older two; I grew up in their shadows. Henry, the
second oldest and my favorite, appears often in poems I have written and in stories which at times only borrow
his nickname, Kiki. He played a major role in my childhood. We were bunk-bed mates. We were coconspirators. We were pals. Until my oldest brother came back from studying in Mexico and left me odd woman
out for always.
What would my teachers say if they knew I was a writer now? Who would’ve guessed it? I wasn’t a very bright
student. I didn’t much like school because we moved so much and I was always new and funny looking. In my
fifth-grade report card I have nothing but an avalanche of C’s and D’s, but I don’t remember being that stupid. I
was good at art and I read plenty of library books and Kiki laughed at all my jokes. At home I was fine, but at
school I never opened my mouth except when the teacher called on me.
When I think of how I see myself it would have to be at age eleven. I know I’m thirty-two on the outside, but
inside I’m eleven. I’m the girl in the picture with skinny arms and a crumpled skirt and crooked hair. I didn’t like
school because all they saw was the outside me. School was lots of rules and sitting with your hands folded and
being very afraid all the time. I liked looking out the window and thinking. I liked staring at the girl across the way
writing her name over and over again in red ink. I wondered why the boy with the dirty collar in front of me
didn’t have a mama who took better care of him.
I think my mama and papa did the best they could to keep us warm and clean and never hungry. We had
birthday and graduation parties and things like that, but there was another hunger that had to be fed. There was a
hunger I didn’t even have a name for. Was this when I began writing?
In 1966 we moved into a house, a real one, our first real home. This meant we didn’t have to change schools
and be the new kids on the block every couple of years. We could make friends and not be afraid we’d have to
say goodbye to them and start all over. My brothers and the flock of boys they brought home would become
important characters eventually for my stories—Louie and his cousins, Meme Ortiz and his dog with two names,
one in English and one in Spanish.
My mother flourished in her own home. She took books out of the library and taught herself to garden—to grow
flowers so envied we had to put a lock on the gate to keep out the midnight flower thieves. My mother has never
quit gardening.
This was the period in my life, that slippery age when you are both child and woman and neither, I was to record
in The House on Mango Street. I was still shy. I was a girl who couldn’t come out of her shell.
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How was I to know I would be recording and documenting the women who sat their sadness on an elbow and
stared out a window? It would be the city streets of Chicago I would later record, as seen through a child’s
eyes.
I’ve done all kinds of things I didn’t think I could do since then. I’ve gone to a prestigious university, studied with
famous writers, and taken an MFA degree. I’ve taught poetry in schools in Illinois and Texas. I’ve gotten an
NEA grant and run away with it as far as my courage would take me. I’ve seen the bleached and bitter
mountains of the Peloponnesus. I’ve lived on an island. I’ve been to Venice twice. I’ve lived in Yugoslavia. I’ve
been to the famous Nice flower market behind the opera house. I’ve lived in a village in the pre-Alps and
witnessed the daily parade of promenaders.
I’ve moved since Europe to the strange and wonderful country of Texas, land of polaroid-blue skies and big
bugs. I met a mayor with my last name. I met famous Chicana and Chicano artists and writers and políticos.
Texas is another chapter in my life. It brought with it the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, a six-month residency on a
265-acre ranch. But most important, Texas brought Mexico back to me.
In the days when I would sit at my favorite people-watching spot, the snakey Woolworth’s counter across the
street from the Alamo (the Woolworth’s which has since been torn down to make way for progress), I couldn’t
think of anything else I’d rather be than a writer. I’ve traveled and lectured from Cape Cod to San Francisco, to
Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Mexico, France, Italy, and now today to Texas. Along the way there has been straw
for the taking. With a little imagination, it can be spun into gold.
Making Meanings
Straw Into Gold
1. What do you still want to know about Cisneros after reading this essay?
2. How would you interpret the essay’s subtitle, “The Metamorphosis of the Everyday”?
3. It is characteristic of most American writers that they turn to their childhoods for subject matter. How do you
explain Cisneros’s interest in her childhood experiences?
4. Describe the tone of Cisneros’s essay. Do you think it is appropriate for the subject matter?
5. Describe in your own words the kind of writer that Cisneros believes she has become. What qualities as a
writer has she developed from the raw material of her personal experience?
6. What do you think Cisneros means when she says she found herself “documenting the women who sat their
sadness on an elbow and stared out a window” (page 5 of the essay)?
7. Identify some fresh images and figures of speech in the essay that reveal Cisneros as an accomplished writer.
How would you describe her style?
8. The title of the essay includes an allusion to the folk tale about Rumpelstiltskin. In the essay itself, how does
Cisneros use that magical story as a metaphor for her writing? What do you think of the metaphor?
Table of Contents
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ANNIE DILLARD
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file:///E:/AP readings/ANNIE DILLARD- Living like weasels.htm
ANNIE DILLARD
LIVING LIKE WEASELS
A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose.
Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and
birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct,
he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of
the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply
as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the
weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and
found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced
on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would
like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still
attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living
weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we
exchanged a long glance.
Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a
remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also
called Murray's Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six
thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their
hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle's nonchalance. Now, in
summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is
terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.
This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is
visible here. There's a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other.
Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods,
fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks--in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.
So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in
all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond's shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut
down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered
bench at the upper, marshy endof the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue
body of water and a deep blue body of sky.
The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at
my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and
flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down
at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as
fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good
arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began
that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any more than you see a window.
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush
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ANNIE DILLARD
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four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone
threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had
been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden
beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the
forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.
If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We
keep our skulls. So.
He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what shattered the enchantment. I
think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing,
and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the urgent current of
instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit
with pleadings, but he didn't return.
Please do not tell me about "approach-avoidance conflicts." I tell you I've been in that weasel's brain for sixty
seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes-but the
weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it
was a blank?
What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won't say. His journal is
tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown.
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as,
frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I
suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?--but I
might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity
of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and
dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I
suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything,
remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the
weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live
under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two
days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair
tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your
ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where
every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested
directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under
the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other,
and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to
locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't
"attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single
necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to
dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live,
5/25/2016 2:53 PM
ANNIE DILLARD
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cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky
flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and
woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
5/25/2016 2:53 PM
Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
ONE
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do
with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women
and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant.
They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen;
a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if
possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell
and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title
women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they
are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and
the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably
mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider
the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal
drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what
is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of
pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for
ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have
money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the
great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have
shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction
remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am
going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the
money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought
which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this
statement you will find that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At
any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one
cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one
does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as
they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is
likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and
licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—
how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I
pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that what I am about
to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; ‘I’ is only a convenient
term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps
be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether
any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the
wastepaper basket and forget all about it.
Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you
please—it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago
in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the
need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and
passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and
crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further
bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river
reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate
had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never
been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought—to call it by a
prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after
minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and
sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of
one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on
the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good
fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking
and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may
find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.
But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back
into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and
flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit
still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot.
Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the
gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at
me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he
was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and
Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a
moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual
repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only
charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen
to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession,
they had sent my little fish into hiding.
What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember.
The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells
anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning.
Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed
smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no
sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed
on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony
with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about
revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind—Saint Charles, said
Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you
my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would
have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essays are superior even
to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of
imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed
and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years
ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of
Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked
him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To
think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led
me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it
could have been that Milton had altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the very
manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one
could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure
is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library
that the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond is also preserved. The critics often say that
Esmond is Thackeray’s most perfect novel. But the affectation of the style, with its imitation
of the eighteenth century, hampers one, so far as I can remember; unless indeed the
eighteenth-century style was natural to Thackeray—a fact that one might prove by looking at
the manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the
sense. But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question
which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have
opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of
black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in
a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied
by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.
That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a
famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it
sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake
those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in
anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the
meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn morning; the leaves were
fluttering red to the ground; there was no great hardship in doing either. But the sound of
music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was going forward. The organ complained
magnificently as I passed the chapel door. Even the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that
serene air more like the recollection of sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groanings of the
ancient organ seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the
verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of
introduction from the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as
beautiful as the inside. Moreover, it was amusing enough to watch the congregation
assembling, coming in and going out again, busying themselves at the door of the chapel like
bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their
shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed
creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and
crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. As I leant against the wall
the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon
be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. Old stories of old
deans and old dons came back to mind, but before I had summoned up courage to whistle—it
used to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor —— instantly broke into a
gallop—the venerable congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapel remained. As
you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging
never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once,
presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself
was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I
thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries, and then with infinite
labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of
another, and then the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy
for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday
somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for
they had their beer and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and
silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and
the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and
money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones
were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great
nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted;
tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the
same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only
the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of
merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from
industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more
lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the
libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate
instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and
the swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and silver
seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses. Men with trays on their
heads went busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes.
The strains of the gramophone blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to
reflect—the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. The clock struck. It was time
to find one’s way to luncheon.
It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are
invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that
was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s
convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and
ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a
glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you
that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college
cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there
with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if
this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many
and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in
its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but
more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent
serving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in
napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it
to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and
flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway
down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call
brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean
glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to
sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the
company—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this
grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting
a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.
If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the
window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not
have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal
padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence
the emotional light for me. It was as if some one had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent
hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of
the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed
different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And
to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the
war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not
very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went
on among the guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on
swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the
background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was
the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different
save only—here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the
murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at a
luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would
have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming
noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves.
Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A
book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found
Tennyson was singing:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’
Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit,
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?
There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things even under
their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing, and had to explain my
laughter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in
the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? The
tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a
queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes—you
know the sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding their coats
and hats.
This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into the afternoon. The beautiful
October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked
through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable
beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being
made secure for another night. After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I forget its
name—which leads you, if you take the right turning, along to Fernham. But there was plenty
of time. Dinner was not till half-past seven. One could almost do without dinner after such a
luncheon. It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in
time to it along the road. Those words——
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear——
sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. And then, switching off into
the other measure, I sang, where the waters are churned up by the weir:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree . . .
What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!
In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons
are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as
Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into
those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that poetry excites one to such
abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at
luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without
troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets
express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not
recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness
and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the
difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more
than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet. For this reason—that my memory failed
me—the argument flagged for want of material. But why, I continued, moving on towards
Headingley, have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has Alfred
ceased to sing
She is coming, my dove, my dear?
Why has Christina ceased to respond
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me?
Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men
and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a
shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces
of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so
stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired
Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far
rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say
‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed
illusion and put truth in its place? For truth . . . those dots mark the spot where, in search of
truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which was
illusion, I asked myself. What was the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive
now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and
their bootlaces, at nine o’clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardens
that run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the
sunlight—which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? I spare you the twists and
turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you
to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to
Fernham.
As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil
the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden
walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the
facts the better the fiction—so we are told. Therefore it was still autumn and the leaves were
still yellow and falling, if anything, a little faster than before, because it was now evening
(seven twenty-three to be precise) and a breeze (from the southwest to be exact) had risen.
But for all that there was something odd at work:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—
perhaps the words of Christina Rossetti were partly responsible for the folly of the fancy—it
was nothing of course but a fancy—that the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden
walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the
pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown
leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights
when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like
the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet
soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no
beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one
of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me
in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung,
were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown
and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships’
windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight
of the quick spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they
were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would no one stop
her?—and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden,
came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress—
could it be the famous scholar, could it be J—— H—— herself? All was dim, yet intense too,
as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword—
the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For
youth——
Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it
was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner
was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy
in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have
been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its
attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy
market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and
women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human
nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were
sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if any one complains that prunes, even
when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a
miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers’ veins who have denied
themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect
that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next,
and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and
these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their
chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every
sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. Down corridors and up
staircases the youth of England went banging and singing. And was it for a guest, a stranger
(for I had no more right here in Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham
or Christchurch), to say, ‘The dinner was not good,’ or to say (we were now, Mary Seton and
I, in her sitting-room), ‘Could we not have dined up here alone?’ for if I had said anything of
the kind I should have been prying and searching into the secret economies of a house which
to the stranger wears so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No, one could say nothing of the
sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart,
body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be
no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One
cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does
not light on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope,
to meet us round the next corner—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef
and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them. Happily my friend, who taught
science, had a cupboard where there was a squat bottle and little glasses—(but there should
have been sole and partridge to begin with)—so that we were able to draw up to the fire and
repair some of the damages of the day’s living. In a minute or so we were slipping freely in
and out among all those objects of curiosity and interest which form in the mind in the
absence of a particular person, and are naturally to be discussed on coming together again—
how somebody has married, another has not; one thinks this, another that; one has improved
out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly gone to the bad—with all those speculations
upon human nature and the character of the amazing world we live in which spring naturally
from such beginnings. While these things were being said, however, I became shamefacedly
aware of a current setting in of its own accord and carrying everything forward to an end of its
own. One might be talking of Spain or Portugal, of book or racehorse, but the real interest of
whatever was said was none of those things, but a scene of masons on a high roof some five
centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the earth.
This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows
and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men—these two
pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming
together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless
the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what was in my mind to the air, when with
good luck it would fade and crumble like the head of the dead king when they opened the
coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those
years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of
gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great
financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the
others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I
said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the
wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we
dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and
the prunes?
Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860—Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I
suppose, by the recital. And she told me—rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes
were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-andso has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr —— won’t give a penny. The Saturday Review
has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we hold a bazaar? Can’t
we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the
subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the —— to print a letter? Can we get Lady —— to
sign it? Lady —— is out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago,
and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a
long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together.1 So
obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads,
she said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. ‘The amenities,’ she said, quoting from
some book or other, ‘will have to wait.’2
At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two
thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we
burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing
then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop
windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some photographs on the mantelpiece. Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel in her spare time
(she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had
left too few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid
shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a
1
‘We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least. . . . It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be
but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise
immense sums for boys’ schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a
good deal.’— LADY STEPHEN, Life of Miss Emily Davies.
2
Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be
postponed. — R. STRACHEY, The Cause.
spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that
the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone into business; had become
a manufacturer of artificial silk or a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or
three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight
and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the
nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs Seton and her
mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their
money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and
lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might
have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked
forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of
one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning
about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or
going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little
poetry. Only, if Mrs Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there
would have been—that was the snag in the argument—no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary
think of that? There between the curtains was the October night, calm and lovely, with a star
or two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready to resign her share of it and her memories
(for they had been a happy family, though a large one) of games and quarrels up in Scotland,
which she is never tired of praising for the fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, in
order that Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by a stroke of
the pen? For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether.
Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it. Consider the
facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born.
Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are
certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run
about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a
pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and
five. If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have
had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and
cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never
have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have
happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth
and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn
money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them
the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs
Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her
husband’s property—a thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs Seton
and her mothers off the Stock Exchange. Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be
taken from me and disposed of according to my husband’s wisdom—perhaps to found a
scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that to earn money, even if I
could earn money, is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my
husband.
At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady who was looking at the spaniel,
there could be no doubt that for some reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their
affairs very gravely. Not a penny could be spared for ‘amenities’; for partridges and wine,
beadles and turf, books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls out of bare earth
was the utmost they could do.
So we talked standing at the window and looking, as so many thousands look every night,
down on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath us. It was very beautiful, very
mysterious in the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very white and venerable. One
thought of all the books that were assembled down there; of the pictures of old prelates and
worthies hanging in the panelled rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing
strange globes and crescents on the pavement; of the tablets and memorials and inscriptions;
of the fountains and the grass; of the quiet rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles. And
(pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep
armchairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the
offspring of luxury and privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had not provided us with
anything comparable to all this—our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty
thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St
Andrews.
So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as
one does at the end of the day’s work. I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to
leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind;
and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their
shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ
booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is
to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the
safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the
effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it
was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and
its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the
blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were
laid asleep—prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge.
Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand—not a boots was
sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late.
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file:///E:/AP readings/Zora Neale Hurston--How it Feels to Be Colored ...
How It Feels to Be Colored Me
I AM COLORED but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact
that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not
an Indian chief.
I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little
Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I
knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode
dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The
town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the
Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains
by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and
got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat
for me. My favorite place was atop the gate?post. Proscenium box for a born first?nighter.
Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually
spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say
something like this: "Howdy?do?well?I?thank?you?where?yougoin'?" Usually automobile or
the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a
piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to
come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But
even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome?to?ourstate" Floridian, and I hope the Miami
Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.
During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through
town and never lived there. They liked to hear me I I speak pieces" and sing and wanted to
see me dance the parse?me?la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these
things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to
stop, only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful
tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels,
to the county?everybody's Zora.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville.
I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river?boat
at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora
of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In
my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brownwarranted not to rub nor run.
BUT I AM NOT tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor
lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not be long to the sobbing school of
Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose
feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter?skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seer
that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not
weep at the world??I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
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file:///E:/AP readings/Zora Neale Hurston--How it Feels to Be Colored ...
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand daughter of slaves. It fails
to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was
successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an
American out of a potential slave said "On the line! " The Reconstruction said "Get set! "
and the generation before said "Go! " I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the
stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice
was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worthi.all that 1 have paid through my ancestors
for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing
to be lost. It is thrilling to think?to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much
praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage,
with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair
beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game
of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I do not always feel colored. Even now ? I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville
before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the
thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I
remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
SOMETIMES IT IS the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the
contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The
New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little
nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that
jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but
gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and
narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the
tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle
beyond. I follow those heathen?follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell
within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I
am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body
is painted blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something?give
pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe
their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the
last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard
what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that
have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
AT CERTAIN TIMES I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and
saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the
Forty?Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy
Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees
knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora
emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
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file:///E:/AP readings/Zora Neale Hurston--How it Feels to Be Colored ...
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a
fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes
me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall
In company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is
discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first?water diamond, an
empty spool bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away,
a rusty knife?blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent
under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant.
in your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held?so much like
the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and
the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or
less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first
place?who knows?
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