White Pebbles

 

             If you are in search of good news these you’d best grab what you can when you can.  That is what I did when I accidentally stumbled upon an online paper published by three scientists under the title “Human Mortality Improvement in Evolutionary Context.”  Here’s the take-away.  (Spoiler alert: it’s heavy going.)  We quantify the rate and amount of mortality reduction by comparing a variety of human populations to the evolved human mortality profile, here estimated as the average mortality pattern for ethnographically observed hunter-gatherers. We show that human mortality has decreased so substantially that the difference between hunter-gatherers and today’s lowest mortality populations is greater than the difference between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees.

 

            Wow!  Wild chimpanzees.

           

I happen to be interested in hunter-gatherers because I am one--in both a metaphorical and a literal sense.  My metaphorical gatherings come mainly from eclectic not to say odd-ball reading (sample above), while my material gatherings are mainly the by-products of my therapeutic ambulation.  This week the two have merged in curious fashion.  My medical advisors are trying to keep my molecules moving by beginning with my legs.  So I am supposed to take what is for me a substantial and challenging walk every day, and I have frequently alluded to these walks, occasionally even described them in blog posts.  The possible satisfactory walking routes are of course limited, but also varied, and most of them avoid pavement in favor of sylvan paths.  On the whole the routes are very pleasant.  But I always enjoy walking more if I can hunt and gather as I go.  According to season I can sometimes gather fungi or nuts.  Within the next ten days the raspberry harvest, which promises to be huge, will be hanging over, or beside, many footpaths.  But my staple quarry are little white pebbles roughly between the size of peppercorns and ping pong balls.  As these little white pebbles are a geological feature of much of the local topsoil rather than seasonal vegetation, they are my gathering mainstays, so to speak; but they probably do require some explanation.

 

A nice feature of our house is a little atrium, or enclosed garden, open to the sky, probably fifteen feet square.  It has some floral plantings and shrubbery, a tiny pool with a spouting dolphin-mouth faucet electrically controlled by a switch in our kitchen, and a short gravel path along which our pet turtles, Chloë and Hector, sedately parade.  A heavily used bird feeder hovers above.  One day it occurred to me that this quirky little secret garden, which gets only a few daily hours of direct sunlight,  could use a little more light.  It might be further improved if the pathway gravel, instead of being a dull gray, were a light-attracting shiny white.  And since wherever I walked I was noticing a scattering of little while pebbles, often half-buried in hard earth, I thought I might start gathering a few on the daily round.  All I needed to carry was a small pointed metal tool to loosen some of the pebbles, and as a receptacle a quart-sized plastic milk container, the mouth of which was, I discovered by happy chance, a serviceable size-gauge. Early experience suggested that if I gather a hundred or so a day for, say, three years, one might begin to see results.  And it’s usually more fun than not to be “doing something”—even if what you are doing is pretty footling.

 

 

Of course, I encounter many other walkers, runners, and bicyclists along the route—either coming toward me or overtaking my leisurely pace from behind.  These people are likely to see me scour the ground, lean over, poke at things with a strange weapon, and put something into a milk bottle.  About a third pretend they don’t see me. Another third are curious as hell but too polite to say anything but “Nice day for it,” or some such, let alone ask what “it” is.  But some small number do ask.  I always tell them: “I am gathering white pebbles.”  Maybe half of this group persists: “What for?” Again, I always answer truthfully: “To brighten up my atrium path.”  We are now talking about small numbers.  I can tell that the fraction of the fraction believing me is maybe fifty percent.  It is not easy to mask incredulity and dark suspicion.  What the skeptical think I was doing is unclear to me, but it obviously isn’t anything good, and I shall not be surprised if I find a detective at my door one day.

 

In my secondary hunter-gatherer role, also known as library mode, or the bibliographical, I was this week reading a few short stories.  I picked up my de Maupaussant, and almost immediately stumbled upon the classic “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”).  How could I have failed to think of it in this connection before?!  You may well know the plot, but here it is in brief.  In some benighted corner of nineteenth-century rural Normandy, two prosperous peasants, Maitre Hauchecorne and Maitre Malandain, are, for reasons unstated, ancestral enemies.  Hauchecorne is a compulsive hunter-gatherer skinflint who picks up anything he finds along the way that might conceivably prove useful in some conceivable circumstance.  Walking into the village of Goderville on a market day, he spots a small piece of discarded string on the path before him, leans over, and picks it up.  One never can tell when a piece of string might come in handy!  Only then does he realize that his nemesis, Malandain, is watching him from a distance.  Embarrassed to be so discovered, Hauchecorne then makes a show of looking around a wider area as though for something valuable he has dropped.  This is a technique well known to anyone who has ever been threatened with discovery while intending to take a pee behind a tree, should such people exist.  The market activities continue into a kind of communal lunch, which is interrupted by the announcement of a horn-blowing town crier.  I love this detail, because as recently as the early 1960s Joan and I lived in a delightful Provençal village where there still was such an official!  The town-crier’s electrifying announcement is this.  A certain local citizen has lost a wallet containing 500 francs and business papers, having apparently dropped it on the road to Goderville.  Has anyone any relevant knowledge?  Handsome reward offered, etc.  “Aha,” thinks Malandain, “So that was what Hauchecorne was up to!”  He informs the police of what he thinks he saw, and soon the whole village buzzes with gossip.  To no effect does Hauchecorne keep repeating “It was only a bit of string!”  Nobody believes him.  I mean—who would pick up a dirty piece of string?  Eventually the lost wallet is found intact and restored to its owner, but by then, it’s way too late.  Hauchecorne’s reputation as thief, liar, or fool—take your pick--has set in the concrete of village malevolence.  Poor Hauchecorne spends the last of his few tormented days telling and retelling his story to unbelieving neighbors.  “It was only a piece of string!”

 

There seem to be at least two things worth pondering in all this.  One of the sadder maxims of La Rochefoucauld is that even “in the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing.” The alacrity with which so many of us are quick to think the worst of strangers is perhaps even more frightening.  

 

old sidewalk slab and pebble scattering

 

        The geology of the pebbles is also worth a thought.  To my untrained eye they are a mixture of rock types, some ignious quartz, but more metamorphic limestone.  Where do these light-colored stones come from?  Not far from my house are some old, crude poured concrete sidewalks, much decayed by invasive vegetation.  The normal size of the sidewalk section is a four-by-four foot square.  The concrete was but roughly finished by trowel, and I note that in general there are on the average surface visible between ten and twenty white pebbles of the sort that, if they were poking through the bare earth of a field, I might go after.  I presume that roughly reflects the “white pebble” component, maybe five percent, of the commercial gravel piles used by the masons.  Many of the light-colored stones seem to have spent half an eon or so engaging with the abrasive sand of a sea bottom.  That puzzles me because in my very limited personal experience  white pebbles are actually quite rare among the shingle of the swimming beaches of the Jersey Shore.

Death Notices

 

 

One of William Blake's Illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts

            Does every ying require its yang?  Last week I was glowing with optimism inspired by a musical concert.  This week quite by accident, I found myself nagged by “night thoughts,” to use the gloom-and-doom term featured in the title of Edward Young’s famous poem of the mid-eighteenth-century, wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  The poem is all about death, a topic the mind may naturally, though by no means necessarily unhealthily, turn to when one gets old.   Young surely inspired Emily Dickinson’s great (and mercifully shorter) thanatological masterpiece “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”: 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. If “rafter of satin” doesn’t creep you out, what would?  Well, what might do so could be the brief introductory essay by Martin Malia, the great Soviet scholar, in The Black Book of Communism, in which he sadly, dispassionately, offers a comparative glance at the numbers of people murdered by Nazis for the crime of their race and the number murdered by Communists for the crime of their social class.  In searching for a bibliographical reference, I inadvertently stumbled upon Malia’s enormous estimates of the hecatombs.

 

            During the Covid pandemic the daily actuarial reports of which Defoe writes in his Journal of the Plague Year are now features of the nightly news.  Certain publications have actually made printing history with their innovative “visuals”—charts and graphs conveying complex information in fine detail.  Though still penny-ante when compared with the political murders of the last century, world-wide Covid mortality has been horrendous.  In our country alone the deaths approach a million.  But equally horrendous also are some other disturbing statistics.   In a recent squib on the PBS New Hour the Covid announcement was supplemented by the news that drug overdose deaths in America last year topped 100,000, slightly exceeding the 95,000 “alcohol-related” ones.  For a particular reason I shall come to later, it will be the alcohol ones I will be pondering  most deeply in this post, but only after mentioning two other categories in which our nation is on the leadership board: vehicular deaths and gun deaths.

 

            In recent years there have been about forty thousand traffic deaths and forty-five thousand “gun-related” deaths in the United States annually.  The term “gun-related” may seem more oblique than necessary, as the “relationship” between the gun and the dead person is actually pretty clear.  A projectile fired from the former has effected the death of the latter.  With regard to highway carnage, we seem to have come to an unstated social consensus that it’s just awful, but whacha gonna do?  There's a price to doing business.  Some of the casuistry over gun deaths is perhaps animated by the fear that we might actually do something to stop them, but will perhaps feel less inclined to do so if we know that about half of all the gun-dead shot themselves quite intentionally, and that perhaps none of the children shot in their strollers were “the intended victim”.

 

            As it happens, I was encountering these gloomy statistics on the Monday and Tuesday of last week while I was still on the high of the symphony concert that I wrote about in my last post.  But blog day was followed immediately by chemotherapy day-–hardly an ordeal any more but still unpleasant enough and laden with intimations of pathology not improved by my recent contemplation of catalogues of macro-mortality.  Illness can complicate your view of many subjects, including some, like narcotic addiction, on which I might have thought I had a firm and unassailable view.  But if you are feeling really lousy and somebody gives you a pill that more or less instantly makes you feel really great, it may make you stop and ponder a moment.  How many Opioid deaths begin in such apparently simple fashion?

 

            Trying to read anything very serious while surceasing sorrow by medical infusion is a lost cause, so I often take a book of short stories to infusion.  This time it was one of my two thick volumes of Mauppasant: inexhaustible, and many of the stories really short.  Picking among them at random I found myself reading one called “The Baptism”.* This turned out to be a mistake.  The story begins with an old navy doctor taking a drink of cognac with a friend or friends.  He proposes a toast to “that charming poison…seductive murderer, and destroyer of people”—alcohol!  He suggests they have probably read Zola’s recent L’Assommoir (1877)—one of the most terrifying of many fictional treatments of the social disaster of alcoholism—but have they ever seen, as he has, the effects of alcohol introduced by the French and the English on the native populations of their colonial territories?  Or, he might have added, the laboring classes of their own native land?   Because that is what his brief tale concerns.  Years ago, he spent time over Christmas at an old family property in the countryside of the Breton coast.  Living on the place was a peasant who with his wife and sister-in-law looked after things.  The wife has a baby, and the proprietor was asked to stand as godfather.  Oh,  and also to front the parents money for the priest’s fee.  On the day of the baptism the January weather is freezing, and the priest is late in arriving.  Nonetheless, to the doctor’s horror the peasants insist on honoring their folk custom that the infant be kept stripped naked until the sacrament is performed.  The priest, moving at the speed of a “sacred turtle” shows no concern for this dangerous barbarity, his concern being the extortion of another five francs from the godfather.  The ceremony finally over, the parents and most of the baptismal party go off to a tavern to celebrate—meaning, for them, getting blind drunk.  When the alcohol runs out, they drink lamp fuel.  By next morning both babe and mother are dead.  It is just that abrupt,  Maybe I have read something more depressing.  Possibly Eli Wiesel’s Night.

 

            Why do the Breton fishermen drink themselves to death?  Because, the narrator says, when drunk they no longer see the foam atop the storm-tossed waves, only the waves themselves.  In a similar way the sweated textile workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution found that “gin is the quickest way out of Manchester.”  There have been great medical advances in the use of chemotherapy, but I believe a basic paradoxical strategy remains: fighting fire with fire, the calculated administration of selected poisons.  This must be a rather delicate business, and probably never wisely self-administered. For Maupassant’s peasants the pain of daily life must have been very great indeed.  Yet certainly the coal-oil treatment was worse than the disease.  We speak of combating cancer and battling Covid, but two hundred thousand annual deaths from the self-administration of supposed palliatives suggest some huge cosmic snafu.  Death is a universal certainty and needs no extra help in performing its work.  Our catalogues of mega-deaths recording the operations of disease and natural disasters need not be swollen further by the depravity and folly of our species.

 

             

 

*I later discovered that Maupassant has two very different stories, with very different tones,  by the same name—“Le baptême”.  The shocking tale I describe is his second, from 1885 .  The first (1884) is tender and affirmative in its attitude to peasant life.

Guy de Maupassant

 

The writer's tomb, Montparnasse cemetery

Though it provides plenty of fodder for legitimate satire, French intellectual life must remain admirable and even inspirational to an American observer.  To begin with it is deeper and certainly more socially approved than in our country.  You still meet a fair number of people who without self-consciousness actually refer to themselves and others as “intellectuals”.  The American “public intellectuals,” fairly recent cultural arrivals-- one might call them nouveaux intelligents—may change this.  But the French news kiosks and television programs are practically clogged with public pundits and rock-star professors.

The French truly do love, respect, and cherish their rich literary heritage.  One very often sees what look like ordinary people sitting in the Métro deeply absorbed in some classic work of philosophy or fiction.  Our publishing industry appears unduly to prize novelty---what’s new.  In France even the trendiest of publishers is likely to have an excellent sideline of “classics”.  Several years ago I discovered a series simply called “Bouquins” from the publisher Robert Laffont.  It includes two fat volumes of Guy de Maupassant.  This is not the “complete works,” of which several multi-volume editions have been published.  But it has about as much of a prolific author as one could conceivably schlepp onto an airplane.   I think it has most of the short stories (he wrote three hundred some), several of the well-known novellas, and a couple of full novels.  Furthermore there is a no-holds-barred scholarly apparatus of the kind one would find only in an academic book here.  This is dipable de Maupassant, but you can dip almost as deep as you want.

               Guy de Maupassant experienced a fair amount of history for a man who died at forty-two.   He was born in 1850 during the short-lived Second Republic, grew up during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and lived out his nearly frantic literary career in the Third Republic, which had been born in the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War and continued for most of the writer’s life in a serious and prolonged economic depression.   He is usually and rightly regarded as one of the great realists, though the realism is more on the psychological and moral side than on that of the historical and material.  One concrete historical moment does seem to be of particular significance: the Franco-Prussian War.  It is the setting for the story called “Boule de Suif” (“Ball of Fat”), the hugely successful piece that put him on the literary map in 1880, and for several of his others.

Like all readers of short stories, I was already familiar with several of his better-known pieces.  Many people have enjoyed “The Diamond Necklace” (“La Parure” in French), which has one of the great trick or surprise endings in the genre.  It makes pretty clear where O. Henry was coming from.  In a general sense it typifies a couple of Maupassant’s recurrent characteristics, precision and economy of plot.  His frequent sexual themes, which once gave him a reputation for naughtiness and lubricity, now seem pretty tame if mildly obsessive.  What I was unprepared for was such a coherent and grand tragic vision of the human condition in short-story form.

Guy de Maupassant came by his neuroses honestly.  He was an upper middle class heir to a sharply contested revolutionary tradition; a syphilitic; a free-thinker tempted by the occult; and a workaholic.  Though bathed in professional success, he worried constantly about his health and essentially withdrew from society for the last decade of his short life.  Although he died relatively young, one of his most fully mastered themes is the inexorability of growing old.

It is a theme recurrent in the short stories and central to one of novels for which the editor of this anthology, large as it is, could find no room, though his commentary has sent me to it :  Fort comme la mort (Strong as Death).  I had never even heard of this book, though I recognized the biblical citation from the Song of Songs:  “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

Fort comme la mort was published in 1889.  That was the same year that Sigmund Freud gave his first son the French name Jean-Martin after his old professor Jean-Martin Charcot, the same Charcot whose lectures Guy de Maupassant had attended at the Salpêtrière.  I don’t usually go for instant intellectual history in microwavable plastic cups, but it really is all there in this novel: love, death, incest, Electra, the Pygmalion myth, the doomed search for immortality through art.  I have not read all that many works of fiction that brilliantly depict growing old.  The best one that comes to mind is Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives Tale.  It is pretty clear that Strong as Death, which I have not yet finished, will give Bennett a run for his money.  I won’t pretend to tell you what it is “about” (senescence), but the three points of the tragic triangle are an aging painter, his aging married mistress, and her nubile daughter.  A contemporary Parisian critic called it “the chastest of Mons. de Maupassant’s works but also the most awful”.  That is the kind of review to die for.