A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

Others might find them as useful as he found Diogenes's. The world is far from being over. When Mr. Emerson came to the jail and said, Henry, what are you doing in here? and he replied, Rafe, what are you doing out there? the words slipped loose like a dove into the spring sky, and were remembered in a London jail by Emmeline Pankhurst, in a South African jail by Mohandas Gandhi, in a Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King, and cannot be forgotten.

MEADOW

 

I remember years ago breaking through a thick oak wood east of the Great Fields and descending into a long, narrow, and winding blueberry swamp which I did not know existed there. A deep, withdrawn meadow sunk low amid the forest, filled with green waving sedge three feet high, and low andromeda, and hardhack, for the most part dry to the feet then, though with a bottom of unfathomed mud, not penetrable except in midsummer or midwinter, and with no print of man or beast in it that I could detect. Over this meadow the marsh-hawk circled undisturbed, and she probably had her nest in it, for flying over the wood she had long since easily discovered it. It was dotted with islands of blueberry bushes and surrounded by a dense hedge of them, mingled with the pannicled andromeda, high chokeberry, wild holly with its beautiful crimson berries, and so on, these being the front rank to a higher wood. Great blueberries, as big as old-fashioned bullets, alternated, or were closely intermingled, with the crimson hollyberries and black chokeberries, in singular contrast yet harmony, and you hardly knew why you selected those only to eat, leaving the others to the birds.

17

 

This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.

W.E.B. DUBOIS

 

Lions have no historians.

WITTGENSTEIN

 

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

 

20

 

Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we shall be there.

 

 

Meleager

 

 

As a little boy will, for no reason known, stand on one leg while swinging the other around and back until his pert behind and heel are in the same cubic foot of space, reaching one arm down, the other up, so Mikkel Andersen, no longer little, took this stance, looking out of the top of his eyes, gaping his mouth, and coming within a hair of losing his balance and that grace for which fifteen-year-olds seem alone to live.

Sven, his friend and companion for the afternoon, had come to a military halt as soon as they were in Mikkel's room, raised an arm straight out, and prodded Mikkel's shoulder with two fingers.

Mikkel's eyebrows (umber bronze) lifted a quarter inch.

Sven's (silver white) scrunched in.

Mikkel did the little boy on one leg. Upright again, he searched Sven's laughing eyes.

Each took one step back.

Mikkel's thick hair tumbled onto and hid his forehead. It spun in a whorl at the top of his head to bunch in feathers over his ears. His eyes were blue in sunlight, grey green in shadow. He wore a soccer jersey (collar white) banded with horizontal mustard and putty green stripes, jeans, stout white socks, and canvas-topped gym shoes.

In any triangle ABC, all the three angles taken together are equal to two right angles. To prove this, you must produce BC, one of its legs, to any distance, suppose to D; then the external angle ACD is equal to the sum of the two internal opposite ones CAB and ABC; to both add the angle ACB, then the sum of the angles ACD and ACB will be equal to the sum of the angles CAB and CBA and ACB. But the sum of the angles ACD and ACB is equal to two right ones, therefore the sum of the three angles CAB and CBA and ACB is equal to two right angles; that is, the sum of the three angles of any triangle ACB is equal to two right angles.

Sven's hair was cropped close, as he had become impatient with it out orienteering. With the help of Mikkel and solicitude and finally laughter of their scoutmaster he had scissored it down to stubble. A spray of freckles rode from cheek to cheek across his nose.

He wore a loose sweat shirt (dove grey) that hung on his shoulders like the blouses of the horsemen on the Parthenon frieze, and frayed denim short pants (once blue, faded to the color of wood ash by the fanatic regularity of his mother's washdays). Barefoot.

Do what I do, his signing hands said. Mikkel nodded that he understood.

When one line falls perpendicularly on another, as AB on CD, then the angles are right; and describing a circle on the center B, since the angles ABC ABD are equal, their measures must be so too, id est, the arcs AC AD must be equal; but the whole CAD is a semicircle, since CD, a line passing through the center B, is a diameter; therefore each of the parts AC AD is a quadrant, id est go degrees; so the measure of a right angle is always 90 degrees.

Sven gave a nanosecond's glance toward his bare feet. Mikkel sank to one knee and untied the laces of his right shoe. Other knee, left shoe. Placing his shoes neatly side by side, he drew off his socks, folded them square, and put them at the midpoint between himself and Sven, who (from a biography of Kierkegaard) thought of the black tumble of carriage wheels, the nobility of horses, the friendship of dogs, and the meanness of candlelight. Mikkel, knowing that he was to duplicate Sven's imagination, thought of the yellow meadows of Mongolia strewn with blue rocks like huddled saurians.

Sven pulled his shirt over his head. High definition of pectorals, teats wide apart. Fine down in the mesial groove from thorax to navel. Skin Mohican copper. Mikkel copycatted. Torso the twin of Sven's except for ruddier teats and a damp wisp of axial hair in the deltoid furrows.

A figure bounded by four sides is called a quadrilateral or quadrangular figure, as ABDC. Quadrilateral figures whose opposite sides are parallel are called parallelograms. Thus in the quadrilateral figure ABDC, if the side AC be parallel to BD which is opposite to it, and AB be parallel to