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walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.
I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through. Passage 7
In a speech delivered in 1952, Rachel Carson warned, “Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from
the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.
Carson voiced these worries before the triumph of television or shopping malls, before the advent of air-conditioning, personal computers, video games, the Internet, cell phones, cloning, genetic engineering, and a slew of other inventions that have made the artificial world ever more seductive. Unlike Earth, the artificial world is mad before us. It feeds our bellies and minds with tasty pabulum; it shelters us from discomfort and sickness; it proclaims our ingenuity; it flatters our pride. Snug inside bubbles fashioned from concrete and steel, form silicon and plastic and words, we can pretend we are running the planet.
By contrast, the natural world was not made for our comfort or convenience. It preceded us by some billions of years, and it will outlast us; it mocks our pride, because it surpasses our understanding and control; it can be dangerous and demanding; it will eventually kill us and reclaim our bodies. We should not be surprised that increasing numbers of people choose to live entirely indoors, leaving buildings only to ride in airplanes or cars, viewing the great outside, if they view it at all, through sealed windows, but more often gazing
into screens, listening to human chatter, cut off from “the realities of earth and water and the growing seed.” Passage 8
From 1908 to 1948, a remarkable woman, Rena C. Hayden, ran the John Lewis Childs? elementary School, K-8, with impeccable taste and albeit, an iron hand. As principal, she hired and fired the staff for its classrooms as well as for its kitchen; personally policed the schoolyards at recess, making miscreants walk single file behind her; disciplined and on occasion, expelled unruly students; and came knocking loudly on parents? doors in her capacity as sometime truant officer. She stood no more than 5?1”; was stocky, with an enormous chest and delicate, small limbs. No animal rights activist, she wore hats with birds on them, tailored suits with a stole of little foxes draped over her shoulders and sensible leather shoes. Her voice, when she had to raise it, sounded to her pupils like the wrath of God Himself, and her bulging blue eyes commanded attention. Awestruck children whispered her name. Both teachers and pupils withered under her terrible gaze.
For forth years, Mrs. Hayden personally oversaw the education of nearly every kid in town. They learned English grammar by diagramming sentences, writing by practicing the Palmer method;
they learned to read by sounding out their letters, arithmetic by working with flash cards at school and at home. Those that would not or could not master these skills were remanded to summer school, and if that did not help, they were unceremoniously left back. She commanded so much respect that few parents ever disagreed with her judgments. Strong in character and social in purpose, she led the Pledge of Allegiance and the 23rd Psalm at assemblies, headed the John Lewis Childs ?contingent to the Mummer?s Parade at Thanksgiving and marched in the very first ranks of every Memorial Day celebration. During the early years, many of her charges left school upon completing eighth grade; she had only nine brief years to teach them to think clearly and independently, to polish the many diamonds in the rough she believed them to be, to inspire them with the highest ideals of American culture. Passage 9
It?s not the turkey alone we?re grateful for. Not the cranberry sauce or the stuffing or even the pumpkin pie. Some of the people seated at the table are strangers—friends of friends, cousins of in-laws—and some are almost desperately familiar, faces we live and work with every day.
In any other week, today would merely be Thursday and the