Eccentrics

Last week’s essay concerning the vanishing jalopy didn’t attract any public comment, but I had a small blitz of personal email about it.  Only some of the messages concerned automobilia; the larger theme was cultural erasure or amnesia generally—things that used to be around, but seem to have disappeared, or that we have simply forgotten.  Most of these were material: 78rpm-records, blocks of ice delivered by guys with huge tongs, glass milk bottles, that sort of thing.  But whole tribes of human beings also vanished.  Two Jehova’s Witnesses came to my door last week.  They were the first in at least a decade, probably two or three decades, and the exception that reminded me of all the people who don’t come anymore, especially Fuller Brush salesmen.  If the term “Fuller Brush Man” is meaningless to you, it simply proves my point.

            One terrible impoverishment of American culture is the general disappearance of eccentricity.  Where have all the eccentrics gone?  The demise of my last two beloved aunts, who both died within the last decade, deprived me of my last vital familial connection to genuine eccentricity.  These two marvelous old ladies lived together for much of their long lives in a ramshackle farmhouse built by one of their brothers (and my uncles) following the directions in an old set of Audel building guides.  Although they were voracious readers of public library books, these volumes, along with a large Bible, some nineteenth-century Masonic and Freethinking stuff deriving from my grandfather, and what seemed to be the complete works of O. Henry, made up the core of their highly eclectic permanent home collection.

            Once when I was quite young and all their other, elder siblings were still around I picked up one of the soiled infidel tracts, a laudatory biography of Voltaire.  Among the many reasons the author found to admire the famous philosophe was that he had publicly ridiculed “the cult of the prepuce of Jesus Christ.”  With a large family group gathered around the dinner table, I asked my Aunt Mildred, now long gone, “What’s a prepuce?”  She turned bright red, but said only “Johnny!”  When years later I found out I was more struck by the erudition than the prudery.  I noticed that book still on the shelves in 2006, at the time of my Aunt Louise’s funeral.

Baxter County, Arkansas, 2004; Aunt Louise at the computer; in the background Aunt Edith, aet. 90

          
They generally dressed in what appeared to be the unsold items from a really scruffy yard sale.  Their eyes were so weakened that they seemed never to notice that there was about a quarter of an inch of dust on everything—everything but the Scrabble board, that is, which was in daily use.  Their hearing was also impaired, so that all communication, including that emanating from the television set, was at a level somewhere between a shout and a bellow.  I rather imagine a conversation between Hardy and Lord Nelson on the quarterdeck during a typhoon.  To cross their threshold really was to enter an alternate universe.             

            It was a delightful realm, of course.  For there is all the difference in the world between an authentic eccentric and the very strange people one sees in the subway.  An eccentric is not a weirdo, a wino, a sicko, or a psycho.  Eccentricity is not pathology, but self-confident and unaffected individuality developed to a remarkable degree.  It was from my Aunt Louise that I must have inherited the journalistic impulse.  For many years she published a column in the local newspaper.  It was aptly entitled “A Little Off Center”.

            The chief cause of the decline of wholesome eccentricity is not difficult to identify.  It is the general homogenization of culture.  The more we text and tweet and generally do our thing the more like everybody else’s thing it becomes.  The current paucity of eccentrics is a result of historical changes long underway.  The Golden Age of Eccentricity was probably the period between 1750 and 1900 or so.  Among the old books in my own library into which I dip from time to time is a wonderful volume by John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (London, 1875).  Since this is an anthology of English eccentrics, domestic animals naturally make frequent appearance.  We are all familiar with the little old lady who leaves everything to the cat; but all this pales in comparison with the habitual behavior of the Rev. Henry Egerton, the son of the Bishop of Durham, and the eighth Earl of Bridgewater.  

 The Earl of Bridgewater

            This learned and bibliophilic nobleman took up residence in Paris, where he became an expert collector of early French literature.  (The Egerton manuscripts in the British Library are today among its notable medieval collections.)   His lordship preferred canine to human company and was wont to give elaborate dinner parties for his numerous dogs, all of them sumptuously appareled and seated at his dinner table.  “If he be lent a book, he carries his politeness so far as to send it back, or rather have it conveyed home, in a carriage,” writes one contemporary observer.  “He gives orders that two of his most stately steeds be caparisoned under one of his chariots and the volume, reclining at ease in milord’s landau, arrives, attended by four footmen in costly livery at the door of its astonished owner.  His carriage is frequently to be seen filled with his dogs.”

 milord Egerton's dinner party

           

Demise of the Jalopy

 Norman Rockwell celebrates bloguiste's fourteenth birthday

“Don't it always seem to go,” asks our great philosopher Joni Mitchell, “That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?” But things are even worse than that, because once it’s been gone long enough—whatever it may be—you don’t even know that you once had it.  Especially in ages of rapid social and material change like our own, large swaths of human experience can be erased in a decade or less.

            Take, for example, the jalopy.  One of the things that still strikes me as odd whenever I am in a large open parking lot at an airport or a shopping mall is that all the cars, practically without exception, look new.  When I was young half the cars on the road were genuine jalopies.  Industrial statistics prove that there were lots of cars made in America in the 1950s.  They cannot all have been exported to Cuba.   Yet you hardly would have known that in the rural enclaves where I used to hang out.  Median vehicular age seemed to be about seventeen years, four months; pre-war models were by no means unusual.  

 a Dorothea Lange classic

            Many of the jalopies were mongrels, the product of some shade-tree jerry-rigging involving somebody’s uncle and a transplantation of  a fortuitously acquired Mercury transmission into a Chevrolet.  These cars were always breaking down, which meant in turn that their owners were always fixing them.  And here’s another thing that’s gone.  There was hardly a kid in America who could not take apart and reassemble any car Detroit made, and a sizeable proportion of our national youth seemed to devote a sizeable proportion of their time to doing exactly that.  Some years ago, after I had been living in my affluent New Jersey college town for a couple of decades, I realized with a start that I had never, no not once, seen a teen-aged boy constructing or deconstructing a jalopy  in the family driveway.  Needless to say I haven’t seen once since then, either.

            There are other interesting and related things that I have not seen.  For example, at no time in the quarter of a century I have lived in my nice neighborhood of expensive houses set upon largish lots amid expansive lawns has any young native speaker of the English language knocked on my door to inquire whether I would like to hire him to shovel my walks, or mow my lawn, or rake my leaves, or clean out my gutters.

            This is only in part a grumpy geriatric’s complaint of O tempora, o mores!  It is actually an index of a serious economic problem in this country—a problem that in another mood might provide the materials for another essay.  But I raise it here in relation to the demise of the jalopy.  Youngsters of my generation did a lot of low-level job hustling of that sort with the practical aim in mind of buying a car.  Because if you were single-minded, you could in fact save enough to buy one with the gleanings from paper routes and hedge-trimmings.

 Green energy of yesteryear

            Of course you get what you pay for.  I am sure that Joni Mitchell must say that somewhere, too, even if I cannot remember exactly where.  Naturally for two hundred bucks you don’t get a car that actually runs.  Getting ahold of a wheel base with something like a chassis on it was merely the first step on a long journey toward actual automotion.  Your jalopy would then demand of you a few hundred hours of sweat equity, cutthroat negotiations with the sometimes unsavory tribe of junkyard proprietors, and nearly endless “trading” with other jalopy builders.  I use the quotation marks on the word “trading” because the ratio of actual goods-exchange to inconsequential schmooze was pitifully low.  Everybody wanted to tell you about the car they were constructing.            

            I deduce from the national press that the prospect of gasoline at four dollars a gallon presages the end of civilization as we have known it.  I know that orthodox existentialism demands that we live in the moment, but could we not on occasion be allowed just the tiniest peek back over our shoulders?  When I entered high school the average cost for a gallon of gasoline was 38¢, and the minimum wage was 75¢ an hour (it’s now $7.50).  So it now requires a whole half an hour of labor to purchase a gallon of gasoline, whereas in the good old days it only took half an hour.   But as I never knew anybody in the South who paid the minimum wage for casual labor, I felt lucky when I could command 50¢.  That was with a hand-powered mower, of course.  Even the meanest jalopy required many hours—so many that I and many of my friends never achieved more than a time-share on tires.  But it did mean that the cultural diversity of the vehicles on the road was conspicuous.

            When I began writing this essay I had no definite knowledge that there was a Norman Rockwell cover that covered it, but I did know there had to be one, if you grasp the distinction.  People like myself are often chided by the politically advanced for buying into the fantasy world called “Norman Rockwell’s America”.  I do have to say that when it comes to fantasy Americas, Rockwell’s is awfully good; but if I had my choice of nostalgias I’d probably choose to live in “Albert Bierstadt’s America” or maybe Mary Cassatt’s.  Unfortunately the political mood of post-modernism requires most of us to live in “Roy Lichtenstein’s America”.  He’s the comic book guy.

           

Bloguiste Completes Swook, and World Trembles

    
     


This post will be the self-indulgent celebration of the bloguiste’s recently achieved swook.  The reader can take it or leave it.

 

          I am inspired by the word blog itself, which is an abbreviated form of web plus log.  Everything about the cybernetic world is rushed and breathless.  One must do what one can to avoid disyllables, which by the very laws of thought must take twice as long to enunciate as  monosyllables.  Swook—a vocable of my own invention that fills the much needed gap separating swim (n.) from book--achieves a wonderful economy.  For by a most extraordinary concatenation of serendipities I yesterday brought to completion two mighty works.

            The first is the manuscript of a book provisionally entitled The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  The second is my swim from Bar Harbor, ME to Redondo Beach, CA.  Neither of the projects was completed on the day it began, needless to say, but neither was the building of Rome, roughly comparable accomplishments.  Furthermore, the swim part might be regarded as slightly allegorical.  From a consultation of Google Maps I discover that the shortest driving distance between Bar Harbor and Redondo Beach is 3283 miles.  That’s if you are willing to go by I-80 and pay some tolls.  Believe me, I’ve paid my tolls.  For the last eighteen years I have tried to start every morning with a swim, and I have succeeded in doing so at least seventy-five percent of the time.

            I am convinced that even by the most conservative reckoning—so conservative that it is probably even honest--I have now completed the 231,123 twenty-five-yard lengths of the Dillon Gymnasium pool needed for a metaphorical crossing of the North American Continent.  To tell you the truth, I was amazed at the discovery.  I thought I was still fighting off sharks somewhere around Saint George, Utah, but statistics don’t lie.  Much.

 Brrrr Harbor, Maine

            Moving on to the bibliographical side of my swook, the manuscript I have just completed is 140,480 words long.  This seemed plenty long to me while I was writing it, but in fact in the great scheme of things it is at best a moderate production.  I’ve produced a few more words that Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities (135,420), though Fenimore Cooper aces me out at 145,469 in The Last of the Mohicans.  These titles also have a happy symbolism about them.  I wrote some of the book in Paris, and as to the last Mohican, nothing more need be said.

Redondo Beach, California: the Pier

            As for the real big boys, I simply cannot compete.  My manuscript falls between a quarter and a fifth of the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the only book I can think of at the moment that seems to provide a fair parallel for literary quality and likely impact on world consciousness.  War and Peace logs in at 587,267 words, though I must admit that I don’t know whether that refers to the original Russian or to the English of the wonderful “Inner Sanctum” translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude published by Simon and Schuster in 1942.

       
Note the date.  One of many great features of this edition is its patriotic character, reflected in the fine introduction by Clifton Fadiman and even more tellingly in its end-paper maps, which show in stark comparison the advance of Napoleon to Moscow in 1812 with the advance of the German army to its furthest point on November 27, 1941.  Think "Stalingrad".   If we take the starting point of Napoleon’s campaign as Köningsberg in Prussia his army had to march—always on its stomach, remember, which is very like the Australian crawl—780 miles each way!  But of course he had to get to East Prussia from Paris in the first place, which would have added another 1053 outward miles to his trip.  In other words I long ago outdistanced Marshal Ney.

       
All of this is vaguely relevant, because the last chapter of my book is about Napoleon—sort of.  It is entitled “Did Napoleon Exist?”  My contract does not allow me to reveal trade secrets in an uncopyrighted format, so that I am forbidden to reveal the answer in this venue.  You will have to read my book to find out.  I will point out, however, that the opening scene in War and Peace is a cocktail party in Saint Petersburg in 1805 in which certain characters are discussing whether on not Napoleon is the Antichrist.  I shall further note that the entire round trip distance between Paris and Moscow is three thousand, six hundred and sixty-six miles!  Need I say more?  Let history judge.

       
For all its exhilaration an achieved swook does bring with it its own anxieties.  What next?  Alexander could weep for the want of new worlds to conquer.  My problem is of a different sort.  A septuagenarian standing before the pier in Redondo Beach has to wonder whether, at a rate of roughly three hundred miles a year, there is much likelihood of ever getting back home.  However, I am planning a slightly more northerly route, beginning at the point where the California-Oregon line hits the coast and swimming eastward along the 42nd parallel to Plymouth Bay.

           

Educational Train Wreck

The question that was fluttering the pundits was “Who will win Ohio?”  I presume that the results of “Super Tuesday” mean that we can start waving  goodbye to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, though we’ll have to wait until November to say goodbye to Mitt Romney.  It’s been a real squeaker, but the Republicans, against daunting odds, have managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.  Mr. Santorum self-destructed just before the Michigan primary when a series of merely unusually bizarre statements encouraged the press to dig out some of his really bizarre statements of yesteryear.  It turns out there is no operative policy of Too Weird to Fail.  Who knew?

            One of his Parthian shots related to a subject I actually know something about, higher education.  Mr. Santorum, who has two postgraduate degrees, said that President Obama is a snob (indeed, “What a snob!”) for saying that all Americans should go to college.  President Obama never said that, but what people actually say has so little to do with the spirit of this campaign that the issue seldom arises.  The President has suggested, several times, that Higher Education is a good thing, and some of his followers are now talking about it as a “right”.  So the question is worth considering. Would universal higher education be good for America?  I don’t think so.

            Among the legends of bureaucratic inanity is the story of a European governmental commission tasked, early in the twentieth century, with investigating an alarming rise in railway accident deaths.   Statistical analysis revealed that most people killed in train accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train.  The recommendation of the commission was simplicity itself.  Just remove the last car from every train!

            Agitation for a “right” to universal higher education here is of similar inanity.  What do you do if the last car in the train of your public education system—that would be public high school, if you grasp my allegory—what do you do if this car keeps derailing?  I would respectfully suggest that what you do not do is add another car.

            Our high schools are a mess—not all of them, of course, but far too many.  The mess is not one that governmental policy has directly created, nor one the federal government can directly address effectively.  While American public education is a somewhat more relevant topic for discussion in a presidential race than contraception, it’s on the same continuum.  And before the educational crisis can be addressed, it has to be convincingly identified.  If secondary education is broken, we need to try to fix secondary education, not winch the problem up to higher ground.  A generic high school diploma that cannot guarantee so much as real literacy is worthless as a professional credential; but the diploma was not always worthless.

            The notion of universal public education financed by the public purse is based in a forgotten contract.  Citizens of the Republic have an obligation to become active contributors to its social health and vigor.  The Republic has the responsibility to provide its citizens with with the opportunity to gain certain fundamental skills of citizenship.  But that forgotten contract was itself founded on something yet more forgotten: the assumption that the young would be prepared for their state education and supported in its pursuit within the context of a wholesome and caring household.

            There is a good deal of outrage about what has followed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision—to wit, torrents of fat-cat money mainly used to finance thirty-second political attack ads on television.  I share the outrage, but if we need to be protected against our own freedom I’d first look elsewhere.  I have heard no outrage, none, that even without the Supreme Court we seem content to have an electorate that casts its votes on the basis of an education gained in the commercial breaks of televised athletic matches.

            The latest in our endless series of school massacres was perpetrated by a certain T. J. Lane, aged 17, in the high school at Chardon, OH.  I don’t know what courses Mr. Lane or his victims had been pursuing.  Not long ago, however, I read the beautifully written memoirs of General William Tecumseh Sherman.  Sherman, who you will recall really won Georgia, was born in 1820 in Lancaster, near Columbus, when Ohio was still largely wilderness.  When he was five he entered the school there, a school like most in the early Republic entrepreneurially established by one educated man or woman who was often the entire faculty. 

             Sherman wrote: “I continued at the Academy in Lancaster, which was the best in the place, indeed as good as any school in Ohio.  We studied all the common branches of knowledge, including Latin, Greek, and French.”  That was when he was eleven or twelve years old.  At sixteen he left to become a cadet at the Military Academy.  “During the autumn of 1835 and the spring of 1836 I devoted myself chiefly to mathematics and French, which were known to be the chief requirements for admission to West Point.”  How many high school students today devote themselves “chiefly” to anything taxing and academic?  The relevant question about Ohio might be who lost it?

The Darling Buds of -- February?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date…

                                                                        William Shakespeare

            Social scientists are forever warning against the use of “anecdotal evidence,” but it is often the most telling kind.  It is hard to convince me of the reality of Global Warming or even her slightly less apocalyptic sibling, Climate Change, on the basis of “computer projections” that no teacher on earth can explain to me.  Anecdote, on the other hand, I generally grasp with ease.

            Having spent most of my younger life in warm climes, the first time I was ever on ice skates was right here in Princeton, N. J.  It was in the winter of 1961-62, during the year I spent in graduate school here.  We skated on frozen Lake Carnegie, along with what seemed like half the town.  The scene was happy and carefree, a kind of upper middle class version of Breughel.  While I struggled to stay vertical on my borrowed skates, my friend and classmate Chuck Fish, a Vermont native, dazzled us with his easy hockey-player moves, which included an effortless backwards glide.

Then,

and then again

and now

            I returned to Princeton permanently in 1965 as a member of the faculty.  We lived at first in one of the high-rise apartment buildings, named for a defunct one-time president of the university, next to the lake.  I have many happy memories of that age, not least among them skating on the lake.  We lived atop a column of apartments at the bottom of which lived the young family of Bart Giammati, later President of Yale and later still Commissioner of Baseball.  We used to get the Giammatis’ kitchen smells (always delicious) up the shared ventilation shaft.  Skating on the lake was so thoroughly established a custom that the apartment dwellers’ association had formed a standing committee charged with its organization and regulation.

            Years pass.  Life goes on.  We move to the center of town and then again, in the late 1980s, to a house of our own not far from the lake.  While I can offer you no statistics I can tell you with certainty that in no more than half a dozen years in the last quarter century has there been a sustained freeze convincing enough to the local police authorities to allow even a day’s skating.  In many winters the lake has not frozen over at all.

            I think I did see a thin crust for half a day last month, of a strength that might have supported a heavy water fowl.  We did have two snow falls.  The first seemed fairly sensational since it came early enough in the autumn that there was still enough unfallen foliage to wreak havoc with the trees.   I have no sharp memory of the second, in midwinter, but it cannot have amounted to much.  I tend to measure things now in terms of an idiosyncratic index of personal foot-pound expenditure.  Shoveling out our large driveway after the second snowfall barely raised a sweat.  Où sont les neiges d'antan?

             There are other interesting indications.  We have been as lavish as possible in using the fireplace, but my winter woodpile seems only slightly smaller than I left it in October.  Many of the days in February have been so warm as to invite me into the garden to begin a desultory and seriously premature “spring” clean-up in the thin winter sunlight.  It is not I alone who am confused.  Some of the clusters of snow drops in the yard have been in what seems like continual bloom since the late autumn.  Our forsythia buds are swelling.  On campus some of the bushes are in bloom.  The daffodils are coming up, and some of the crocuses are already in bloom.  Not to mention the japonica.  The weather forecast for today is “Wintry Mix”.  I never thought I could welcome such a prediction with something akin to enthusiasm, but I have to say my feeling is “About time!”

            I want to respect the limitations of my anecdotal evidence.  I declare myself innocent of all extrapolation.  I confine myself to the past two decades, and to a single modest sized county in central New Jersey.  I make no global claims, and I draw no conclusions from my flaming shrubbery concerning the wisdom or unwisdom of drilling for oil in Alaska or launching a Manhattan Project for the exploitation of algae.  However, there are certain things that you cannot help noticing.

 not making much progress

Cast Party

 The Cast

            The heroine of this essay will be Ms. Cora Louise Fleming-Benite, granddaughter extraordinaire and, for the brief captivity of a few hundred words, guiltless prey of the social historian.  If you are a reader of history books, certain clichés are probably incised upon your cerebellum.  The most notorious, perhaps, is “the rise of the middle class.” The middle classes have so long been ascending above the pages of our history books as to be visible only with the aid of the most powerful optical instruments.  But there are many others: “index of social change,” “the formation of elites,” “revolutionary consciousness,” “liminality”, etc., etc.

            It is sometimes possible to observe rapid social change very close up.  Take a farm kid from the Ozarks and, just for the preposterousness of it, send him to Oxford, where he will meet and eventually marry the brilliant and accomplished daughter of Edwardian meritocrats.  Let the female issue of the Oxonians, having already begun a stellar academic career, marry an equally brilliant Israeli historian of Iraqi background and terrifying erudition.  Then take the infant products of that union to Paris for four or five years and, upon their eventual return to America, place them in the Ecole Internationale de New York (alias EINY) so as to allow them to maintain their native French.

"What?  Me worry?"

            The Parisian schools in which my granddaughters were enrolled have a very cool institution called the semaine verte—a “green week,” which is a sort of American school “field trip” on steroids.  The kids are rusticated to some gorgeous old farmstead in the Cevennes or somewhere, where they get to breathe the air and milk the cow, or feed the pig, or trample the grapes—in short, to go seriously rural for a few days.

            Part of the authentic Frenchiness of EINY is that they should offer such an opportunity to the cliff dwellers of the concrete canyons of New York City.  But for New Yorkers, the Cevennes region is a little distant.  The obvious destination combining Francophonie with reasonable proximity is Québec.  However, if you are making your trip to Québec in the winter, it is much more likely to turn out to be a semaine blanche than a semaine verte.  Thus did my granddaughter Cora Louise find herself last week at the winter resort of Mont Tremblant to the northwest of Montreal.

            But here social history ends and human drama begins.  Social history might explain why little Cora could indulge in such exotic sports d’hiver as ice fishing and dog-sledding—hyperborean exertions known to her aging grandfather only from the pages of Jack London.  But it was not sociology that determined that on the last day of the school trip, indeed on the last straightaway of the last ski run, Cora Louise should fall and painfully injure her lower right leg.  That will have been determined either by the God of Small Things or the Random Play of Electrons that our godless age seems to prefer to the mellower concept of Providence.  In any event, that is what happened.

 Scene of the Crime: Mont Tremblant, P.Q.

            The battlefield diagnosis, which at the time seemed a reasonable hypothesis, was “sprained ankle”.  The treatment for that sort of thing is three pronged: ace bandage, aspirin tablet, and a certain level of words of comfort from concerned adult supervisors.  That therapy, reinforced by the usual animal energies characteristic of young persons on long bus trips, proved entirely sufficient to return her uncomplaining to New York City.  But the next morning her vigilant mother could tell that all was still not quite right.  Her misgivings were confirmed by a radiologist in the Emergency Room.  Cora’s ankle was not sprained; the ankle bone was broken.

            This means about a month in plaster.  Except that to my admittedly inexpert eye it doesn’t seem to be plaster anymore.  It’s more like gauze reinforced with light-weight kryptonite.  It is no doubt admirably suited to its task, though as a writing surface it is less satisfactory than the old plaster casts of my youth.  Even so I was able to leave my mark—“Gran Dad,” written in a jagged, spidery hand as though the material written upon were a white window screen.  But other inscribers of the cast have sensibly gone for the pictorial, and even since I took the photograph two days ago, it has flowered with cheery images in red, yellow, orange, and green.

            Her school is a fair distance from her home, and even the most modest ambulation is no small challenge under the circumstances.  Little Cora is having to master the use of crutches, and she has faced the awkwardness of it all with determination and a nearly supernatural cheerfulness.  This little girl is one of God’s brighter sunbeams.  In general her most pessimistic category is the glass three-quarters full.  The very least I can do is salute her in “Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche.”

XLII

“Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything,”  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As I left for my dawn swim this morning, I still had no idea for a blog essay, but I knew that I could count on the exquisite boredom of natation to serve as midwife to some invention or another, however desperate; and as I made the turn at the end of my forty-first length it came to me in a flash.  Forty-one is followed, almost immediately by forty-two; and according to Douglas Adams, forty-two is the meaning of everything.  Of course Adams has no idea why, nor do any of his enthusiasts whom I have encountered.  The reason is that forty-two is the biblical number of completion.

In Book 9, chapter 19, of War and Peace the novel’s hero, Pierre Bezukhov, arrives at the conclusion that the Emperor Napoleon is the Antichrist and that he, Bezukhov, has the sacred duty to assassinate him.  The first conclusion is child’s play.  First you must adapt the ancient conventions of kabbalistic gematria to  the Latin alphabet in the manner favored by the mystical Freemasons of Lyon, as follows: 

a  b  c   d  e  f   g  h  i    k    l     m    n    o     p    q       r    s    t

1  2  3  4  5  6 7  8  9 10 20   30   40  50  60  70   80  90  100           

u        v        w      x       y       z

110   120  130   140   150    160

You then write out, in French, the title L[e] Empereur Napoléon, cheating ever so slightly by not eliding the e of the article.  Now add it all up to get 666, the Number of the Beast (See Revelation 13: 18).  More important from Pierre’s point of view is that in the fifth verse of that same chapter it is written that the beast will be given authority for a period “forty and two months.”  Pierre, an erudite fellow, knows that when the Bible speaks of “days” or “months” it actually means years.  He knows as well that the year is 1812, meaning that Napoleon, born in 1769,  must in fact be forty-two years old.

 Napoleon, alias Apollyon the Destroyer, alias 666

It takes Pierre a little while to figure out his numerological role in the great scheme of things, but he does so after a certain amount of orthographic jiggery-pokery, this time dropping an e that should be there.  It turns out that the phrase L’ Russe Besuhof (roughly, duh Russian Bezukhov) is also a 666.  So the Beast has come to the end of his allotted days.  Forty-two is all you get.  History buffs and readers of Tolstoy will know that things didn’t quite work out, but that was the theory.

L' Russe Besuhof

Yet that is only the beginning of the biblical forty-twos.  Such chiliasts as Joachim of Fiore were particularly thrilled by what they found in Revelation 11:3, in which the seventh apocalyptic angel gives license to the “two witnesses” to prophesy for a period of “a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.”  Because Joachim knew, as I feel certain my erudite readership also will, that in the genealogy with which the gospel of Matthew commences there are, as it happens, precisely forty-two generations between Abraham, with whom God made the original covenant, and Jesus Christ.

Everyone further knew that there are thirty years in a generation and that 42 x 30 = 1,260, the number of days (meaning of course years) granted to the sackclothed witnesses.  Something very big had happened forty-two generations before the birth of Jesus, and something equally stupendous ought to happen in the year 1260, with the completion of the forty-second generation after his birth.  Joachim thought that the sackclothed fellows would be some new kind of monks.  The Franciscans and the Dominicans, who had appeared on the scene only after Joachim’s death, thought so too.  That is why most of Europe was anticipating The End as the days grew shorter toward the close of the year 1260.  That is why so many medieval writers (such as Dante in the Vita nuova) divide their compositions in forty-two numbered parts.

 How Joachim of Fiore saw things

The definitive trip of all time must surely have been the Exodus out of Egypt.  If you have absolutely nothing better to do you can read through the story, calculator in hand, and make note of the number of times the children of Israel set up temporary camp on their way to the Promised Land.  But since you now know the “number of completion” you could probably work it out in your head without reading anything.

Not every completion ends with milk and honey, of course.  When it comes to prophets, it is best to show them some respect.  As Elisha was passing through the village of Bethel, a bunch of bad little children ran after him, mocking him for his bald head.  “And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them.  And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them” (II Kings 2:23).  The only trouble with doing stuff like this in the swimming pool is that you are likely to lose count—of laps that is, not of wicked children.

 Naughty, naughty boys!

The meaning of all this should be clear: if you regard an important part of good writing to be its alignment with the eternal verities of the cosmos, you must structure its concluding paragraph in precisely forty-two words, not more, not less.