I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.
The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as far as I can tell), but the day Mr. Krause read it to us and his other seventh-grade class was the last schoolday before Christmas break — when no one, teachers included, had much interest in academic matters. (An innocent time, eh?)
Mr. Krause’s voice had a flattened, slightly nasal quality to it; years later, as a teacher myself, I heard a recording of Kurt Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five (“Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore”) and thought I recognized in his voice my old teacher’s. As he read the story that day, grinning almost the whole time, he sat on the desk and kept having to stop and laugh. Indeed, even not counting the jokes, it must be a fun story to read aloud — all those smackings and tockings of all the k-sounds. But I’m surprised, in retrospect, that he read it to seventh graders; the diction and sentence structure, the almost literal slipperiness of the writing, seems to me a tad above listening-comprehension level.
(Most of all, I guess, I’m surprised that even one of those listeners still remembers as much about the day as he does.)
The title is “The Last Clock,” not to be confused with Thurber’s more well-known, full-length book, The Thirteen Clocks. Online, the story seems to be available nowhere except at the site of The New Yorker, which originally published it in February, 1959; to read it there, you’ll need either to be a New Yorker subscriber, or you’ll need to purchase (for $5.99) one-year access to the digital version of the issue.
Offline, the most obvious choice is to find the issue in some form at a library… or obtain a copy, one way or another, of the Thurber anthology called Lanterns and Lances.
In the meantime, as a little bit of a tasty holiday treat, I thought I’d transcribe the first section (and a bit more) into a page here at RAMH. (Links to both the New Yorker site and to some places to obtain Lanterns and Lances appear at the end of that excerpt.)
Enjoy!
Read “The Last Clock” (excerpt), by James Thurber
Okay, that had me laughing outloud in spots.
And where can I get an old inspirationalist to keep me from worrying about stuff that isn’t worth worrying about?
I’m embarrassed that I went to look up psychronologist, just in case it was a real thing I just didn’t know.
I love to hear which stories from childhood stick with people. When I was young, my brother and I saw a short film adaptation (on HBO, of all places) of Ray Bradbury’s short story, “All Summer in a Day,” and it haunted us. It wasn’t till I was a teen that I tracked down the story.
And I love the notion of your teacher stopping to laugh at what he was reading to you all.
Jules brings up a good thought. What were the stories we remember from our younger days? I read a Science Fiction story called “The Time of The Great Freeze”. I must have read it dozens of times. The last time I checked it was out of print, but I still remember the description of the world in a deep freeze. And the first time I read The Veldt, that great short story by Bradbury. I loved stories like that with endings that are sort of nebulous and scary.
Jules: I loved the lists of clockish words…
When I was in college, a history professor’s lecture once centered on how people came to think of things as those things — whatever they are — as opposed to any others. Consider a table, he said. Nowadays, if you asked someone what makes something a table as opposed to, well, a bench or something, s/he would get into the various uses to which tables (vs. benches) were put. But in the Middle Ages (I believe he said), a person would say that a table is a table “because it partakes of tableness.”
…which reminiscence was triggered when I saw that the ogress had looked into specialists dealing with — as well as “clockism, clockship, clockdom, clockation, clockition, and clockhood” — clockness.
(Admit it. You were wondering where I was going with that, weren’t you???)
cynth: You can read “The Veldt” online here, if you don’t mind small green print on a black background. If you DO mind it, of course, there are numerous ways to fix that…
“Nebulous and scary” is always good for me, too. The Missus and I were talking recently about the film of Stephen King’s “The Mist.” We both liked that, although the ending was pretty bleak; she told me that the short story/novella (which I haven’t read) ends in a completely open-ended way — I think I’d prefer that ending to the one the movie gave us.
As an undergraduate, I studied Greek philosophy. Plato referred to the defining characteristic of something, its essential -ness abstracted from any particular physical manifestations of the thing, as a Form. I recall reading one commentary where the author, perhaps unwisely, had chosen to use the notation F to stand for the Form of something, leading to much faintly risible rumination on what constituted the F-ness of, for example, a table. Or a clock. In this author’s view, the fundamental question posed by Socrates was, “What is it that makes F things F?
One wag had written in the margin, “How the F*** should I know?”