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| John Knox |
March 19, 2014
Building a fire
In the
spirit of the thing, this thing, in which every bit is a fragment ripped off
something else, my friend Gaspar Stephens[1]
sent me the following:
In Re your Scotsmen (TA, 3/18/14), this question from Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”:
The
trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in
the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty
degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him
as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to
meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty
in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold;
and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality
and man's place in the universe.
?
In short, my Scotsmen like “yond Cassius”
have “a lean and hungry look”; they think too much? I
don’t think so. It’s not that they think too much; they just take what they
think too seriously.
“Well, it doesn’t matter what you believe,
it’s that you believe. Right?” she said. Not twenty-two years ago but twenty-two and fifteen
more, I might have agreed. She was serious and seriously lovely. I was serious,
too, and seriously young. And we were alone in the back seat of a car, parked at the
end of a dirt road. (Was it Dave Barry that used to say, “I’m not making this
up”?) I did agree, though it made me uncomfortable.
But
now − however serious and intense and intensely lovely − I can’t not say, “Bullshit.”
Not
very compassionate. Not very smart. I can take her home, now! And I could be wrong.
q
[1]
See March 9 “Kicked out for an apple?”; February 27 “Dappled, brinded, dim;
folded, spindled & mutilated”; and February 25 “And that’s the way it is.”
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