[Video: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, covering Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” in a 2009 concert appearance. I’m happy to find that they do not embarrass themselves at all — while the cover isn’t notably “original,” I wouldn’t have believed, until I saw and heard it, that any band could keep up with Grace Slick and the Airplane. As when I heard the song for the first time, the hair stood up on the back of my neck with the last few notes here.]
As sometimes (often) happens, the blogger who identifies as whiskey river led me, this week, down several rabbit holes of wonder. They reminded me — surrounded by the dull (however temporary) cardboard and other detritus of the ongoing move-in to our new home — how surprising and delightful the world can be. For instance, consider this:
Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.
I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams’ impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.
It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn’t think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.
I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and, furthermore:
I don’t deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
(G. K. Chesterton [source])
At cocktail hour — when we finally for the day put down the boxes and bins needing unpacking, and put our feet up — we’ve been occasionally working our way through the BBC’s Father Brown series, an episode at a time. I’ve not yet read any of Chesterton’s mysteries featuring the eponymous priest, a failing I hope to correct eventually… but that quote per whiskey river intrigued me enough, once I’d tracked it down, that I read a bit more of the surrounding text (from a novel called Manalive).
As near as I can tell, the passage comes from a letter to the narrator which someone has written; it describes the odd behaviors of a man named Smith. Here’s some of it:
He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a war between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it…
The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation. He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her…
They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury. Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down. “I am a very domestic fellow,” he explained with gravity, “and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.”
He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was. The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other people’s.
“I know there’s a fellow called Smith,” [he’d say] in his rather weird way, “living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.”
(Chesterton [ibid.])
I’m laughing, now.
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