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The Most Wonderful Railroad in the World

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Hobo Hopping onto a Freight Train

I am currently reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. It is such a pity that people don’t write letters any more. And they don’t read much either. (In fact, is anybody even reading this?) Here, in a 1948 letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg, Jack reminisces about his enjoyment hopping freight trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Southern Pacific is the most wonderful railroad in the world incidentally . . . on a Sunday morning, riding down through the sunny San Joaquin Valley of grapes and women-with-bodies-like-grapes, I reclined on a flatcar reading the Sunday funnies with the other boys, and the brakemen smiled at us and waved cheerful. It is the hobo’s favorite road. Anybody with any sense in California can ride between Frisco and LA endlessly on that road, once a week if they want to, and nobody will ever bother them. When the train stops at a siding, you can jump off and help yourself to fruit if you’re near a field. So wonderful Neal [Cassady] is working for a wonderful railroad, in the [William] Saroyan country . . . (if there’s any beastly murderousness it’s not my fault or Neal’s or Saroyan’s.) The Santa Fe brakemen will kill you if they catch you and if they have enough clubs. But not the SP.

Neal Cassady is a good buddy of Kerouac’s, and William Saroyan was an Armenian-American author of novels and short stories living in Fresno.

Oscar Wilde on American Women

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Irish Writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Reading an 1893 play by Oscar Wilde entitled A Woman of No Importance, I ran across some of the author’s famous wit at the expense of American womanhood:

Lady Caroline. These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the Paradise of women.

Lord Illingworth. It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.

Lady Caroline. Who are Miss Worsley’s parents?

Lord Illingworth. American women are wonderfully clever in concealing their parents.

Lady Hunstanton. My dear Lord Illingworth, what do you mean? Miss Worsley, Caroline, is an orphan. Her father was a very wealthy millionaire, or philanthropist, or both, I believe, who entertained my son quite hospitably, when he visited Boston. I don’t know how he made his money originally.

Kelvil. I fancy in American dry goods.

Lady Hunstanton. What are American dry goods?

Lord Illingworth, American novels.

Lady Hunstanton. How very singular! . . . Well, from whatever source her large fortune came, I have a great esteem for Miss Worsley. She dresses exceedingly well. All Americans do dress well. They get their clothes in Paris.

Mrs Allonby. They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.

Lady Hunstanton. Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?

Lord Illingworth. Oh, they go to America.

“Hope Is a Bad Thing”

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This is the second part of my Henry Miller post. It is a quote from “Peace! It’s Wonderful!”—the first essay in the author’s collection, The Cosmological Eye. It sounds very Buddhist or Taoist.

Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation so I have come to feel about my detachment from America. Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun has ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within. I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Before this inward change came about I used to think that we were living in extraordinarily different times. Like most men I thought that our time was the worst possible time. And no doubt it is—for those, I mean, who still say “our time.” As for myself, I’ve thrown away the calendar by which one reckons the lean and the fat years. For me it is all gravy, one continuous, marvellous stream of time without beginning or end. Yes, the times are bad, permanently bad—unless one becomes immune, becomes God.

Deer, Wildcats, Tigers & Bears

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One of China’s greatest writers of prose and poetry was Liu Tsung-yuan. Here is Red Pine’s translation of one of Liu’s tales:

Deer are afraid of wildcats, wildcats are afraid of tigers, and tigers are afraid of bears. Covered with long shaggy hair and able to stand upright, bears possess exceptional strength and are capable of killing people. In the south of Ch’u there once was a hunter who could make all kinds of animal calls with his flute. One day he took his bow and arrows and his firepot into the mountains, and he made a call to attract deer. He waited, and when a deer appeared, he started a fire, then he shot the deer. But when a wildcat heard the deer call, it came too. The hunter was terrified and pretended to be a tiger to frighten it. But when the wildcat ran off, a tiger appeared. The man was even more terrified and pretended to be a bear. The tiger disappeared. But a bear heard the call and came looking for a mate. When it saw the man, it grabbed him and tore him apart and ate him. It turns out that those who rely on external aids instead of developing what they have within themselves invariably end up as bear food.

“Untranslatable Sensations”

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Brazilian Writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

In August 2023 I wrote: “Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.”

Now I am reading her second novel, The Chandelier (1944), which is strange, arresting, and beautiful by turns. Here is a paragraph. Its strangeness is very Clarician.

She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: In order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement—if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it is with movements too—in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone.

Bibliothecaphilia

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Stacks in the London Library

Books are a major part of my life. I am grateful that I discovered a love for books before all the digital simulacra have taken over the minds of the populace. Therefore I was delighted to discover this passage in a piece by Charles Lamb entitled “Oxford in the Vacation” in his Essays of Elia (1823). The word “Bodleians” is a reference to the libraries of Oxford University, about which more can be found by clicking here.

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

I will keep these words in mind as I take the train downtown tomorrow to Los Angeles’s Central Library, which is celebrating this year its centennial at its present location.

Smoke and Mist

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I am three quarters of the way through James Lee Burke’s Rain Gods (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). It is one of the author’s Hackberry Holland novels set in Southwest Texas. I am also beginning to think that its author has exceeded the limits of the genre and approached the level of literature. The following quote is what goes through the mind of a strange mass murderer who calls himself the Preacher as he sits cradling a Thompson submachine gun on his lap.

He did not know the hour and never wore jewelry or a watch when he worked. He did not measure the passage of time in terms of minutes or hours but in terms of events. There were no vehicles on the county road. There was no sign of activity inside the house he was about to invade. There were no insomniacs or early risers turning on lights in the neighborhood. There was a fire burning in the grass, and horses were nickering in the darkness, the smoke providing a plausible explanation for their sense of alarm. The sky was booming with thunderous explosions; not those of dry lightning but the kind that promised serious rain, perhaps even the type of monsoon that gave back life to a desert. In spite of the acrid tinge of smoke inside the mist, the night was as lovely and normal as one could expect during the late summer in Southwest Texas.

Preacher stuffed his trousers inside the tops of his boots and up-ended his Thompson in one hand, the other gripping his cane, then began walking through a thicket toward the ranch house in the distance, his face as impervious as molded plastic to both the brambles and the rain.

“The Mystery of All Mysteries”

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Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991)

He wrote in Yiddish, yet he was one of the greatest storytellers who have ever lived. I have just finished reading his collection Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories and, for the first time in my life, I found all of the stories within to be great, with no falling off in quality from beginning to end as is usual. The following excerpt is from his story “The Unseen”:

On his last night, Nathan dreamed that Roise Temerl [his beloved first wife] and Shifra Zirel [his abusive second wife] were one woman with two faces. He was overjoyed at her appearance. “Why have I not noticed this before?” he wondered. “Why did I have to go through this trouble and anxiety?” He kissed the two-faced female, and she returned his kisses with her doubled lips, pressing against him her two pairs of breasts. He spoke words of love to her, and she responded in two voices. In her four arms and two bosoms, all his questions were answered. There was no longer life and death, here nor there, beginning nor end. “The truth is two-fold,” Nathan exclaimed, “This is the mystery of all mysteries.”

“The Future Lies That Way to Me”

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Henry David Thoreau

Although I had read his essay entitled “Walking” before, upon re-reading I was struck by this passage about going west rather than going east. Henry David Thoreau never made it out west, unless you include Minnesota. And Thoreau was a sick man by that time.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe

“The Thorns and Dangers of This World”

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King John Poisoned by Monks in Shakespeare’s Play

I have just finished re-reading Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John. While this is not the evil King John of Robin Hood fame, this is certainly a weak monarch who leaves England in an awful mess. As I read these lines spoken by Philip Faulconbridge, usually referred to in the play as “Bastard,” I was reminded of the United States under Donald Trump’s second term, which I liked to refer to as his Revenge Tour. The lines are from King John IV.3.140-158:

I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of this world.
How easy dost thou take all England up!
From forth this morsel of dead royalty [the body of Prince Arthur],
The life, the right and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven; and England now is left
To tug and scamble and to part by the teeth
The unowed interest of proud-swelling state.
Now for the bare-pick’d bone of majesty
Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest
And snarleth in the gentle eyes of peace:
Now powers from home and discontents at home
Meet in one line; and vast confusion waits,
As doth a raven on a sick-fall’n beast,
The imminent decay of wrested pomp.
Now happy he whose cloak and cincture can
Hold out this tempest. Bear away that child
And follow me with speed: I’ll to the king:
A thousand businesses are brief in hand,
And heaven itself doth frown upon the land.