When I first
encountered the phrase brown study in
British authors of the early twentieth century I was ignorant of its meaning
but imposed upon it the absurd notion that it must refer to a special room in a
man’s house. Even gross error
confidently embraced is not easily dislodged and only later did I come to
appreciate the idiom as defined by Brewer. A brown study is a certain frame of mind, “apparent thought,
but real vacuity. The corresponding
French expression explains it—sombre
réverie. Sombre and brun both mean
sad, melancholy, gloomy, dull.”
I
am always uneasy about starting an essay when, as now, I am unsure what it will
be about—beyond being the product of a brown study, that is. It might be a tribute to smart Jewish
girls. It might be a commendation
of literary study. On the other
hand it might be of a more conventional, not to say tedious genre—grandparental
chortling about cute things their grandchildren say.
But
no essay could be plagued by more “mixed messages” than the recent slice of
life it will attempt to report. About
a week ago we learned that a very dear friend, Joanna Lipking, had died in her
sleep in Evanston IL on February 1st. Jo was married to Larry Lipking, my Princeton colleague in
the sixties and seventies. The
Flemings and the Lipkings, who were still young, barely, hung out together and
formed that bond of friendship that only the youthful can form. Jo was brilliant, crackling with
intellectual energy, and she expressed her strong opinions emphatically. We were sad when the Lipkings moved on
to Northwestern, where both were offered appointments in the English
Department.
The
friendship continued, of course, but in the distant and intermittent mode
dictated by geography. We had all
been together fairly recently, when we discussed plans, long agreed upon in
principle, to travel together in Sicily.
That, alas, can never happen.
The proposed trip must remain forever an emblem of many things undone and
conversations not had. That is how
death works, or one of its ways.
It
will take me a while to wrap my mind around this latest evidence of our common
mortality, though as one grows old one also becomes more familiar with the
sting. And if in the midst
of life we are in death, it works the other way around, too. The week before we had been in New York
at a brunch to celebrate the eleventh birthday of our delightful granddaughter
Lulu. Lulu is another dark-haired
beauty of fierce intelligence, interested in practically everything, and
precociously talented in the pursuit of many of them. She had already had a “real” party of her peers. This was a ceremonial event mainly
populated by her elders, including two of her godparents—two eminent academics,
natch.
Her
godmother, who happens to live in the same apartment building, is Catharine
(Kate) Stimpson, a prominent professor of modern literature and women’s
studies, a novelist, and a past president of the Modern Language Association. Those are some of the public externals
one would find on her vita, to which
those who know her even so slightly as I do would have to add achievements
considerably more important, such as “fine woman” or “excellent person”. What does one give an eleven-year-old
for her birthday? What does one
give this eleven-year-old? We had chosen a couple of nice little
things for her, but Kate Stimpson gave her a copy of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
I
shall refrain from launching into an ill-informed encomium of Emily Dickinson,
except to say of her short poems what Saint Gregory says about the Bible. Here is a gentle stream in which the
lamb may safely wade; here is a mighty river into which the elephant can plunge. But I wondered if little Lulu was
really “ready”?
I
knew I was. When I heard the news of Jo Lipking’s death, one of the
first things I did was to return to one of Dickinson’s most haunting and
enigmatic poems, a poem about death and the “safety” or consecrated
indifference of the dead.
Safe
in their Alabaster Chambers -
Untouched
by Morning -
and
untouched by noon -
Sleep
the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter
of Satin and Roof of Stone -
Grand
go the Years,
In
the Crescent above them -
Worlds
scoop their Arcs -
and
Firmaments - row -
Diadems
- drop -
And
Doges surrender -
Soundless
as Dots,
On
a Disk of Snow.
I do not
pretend fully to understand this poem, but I don’t know a more striking line in
English than “Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone”. I believe the final lines—the silent dots on the disk of
snow—make technical allusion to telegraphy, the cybernetic wonder of the
nineteenth century, but again I am not certain. Does any of my readers have an idea?
“The
mind is its own place,” as Milton’s Satan famously observed. The mind is seldom wholly occupied with
a single theme. There is a
jostling competition for the mind’s attention, and mine was settled on some electrical
problems related to a recent ice storm when a few days ago I got an email from
my daughter leaking what was pretty clearly the firstfruits of Lulu’s close
encounter with the newest book in her library. Lulu had written her own first poem. It is not a Dickinsonian imitation, but
it is certainly of Dickinsonian inspiration. And it connects.
What is Brown?
Brown
is the Forest Underground
An
otter resting
In
the lake
And
the swamp
When
it's about to wake.
It's
the smell of the old book shop
When
you come in
And
the queer silence
When
you start to stop.
A
color like no other
But
it's always chosen last
And
you always realize it
When
the time has long been past.
It's
only just a shade
Speaking
like an artist,
A
bit of all the colors
In
a sweet-simple serenade.
Lulu Fleming-Benite
