Superstition is built to last

“Someday,” the homeopath said softly, “this world will be burned to a crisp by some solar mishap and all that will be left will be cinder about the size to blow in somebody’s eye. And this is a terrible thing to say but it’s the truth—when that day comes, I’ll be glad. And why, sir? I’ll tell you. Because of unreasonable and groundless superstition. Because of just such irrational and unfounded beliefs as this one you bring up today as if it was something deserving of serious attention. And this is just one instance, mind you. How many more do you think there are? Sometime you’d ought to look in a microscope at a drop of pure clear well water and see the bacteria in it moving and spinning around, it’d scare you to death. That’s how superstition moves and spins through the clear air of the world, like bacteria and deadly germs. You can buy Rough on Rats and for all I know Rough on Tarantulas and Rough on Death Adders but what kind of poison can you buy for a pest that’s ten times worse than them and itch and cholera combined? Afflictions and sickness wear out, but superstition’s like tarpaulin, made to weather the storm. If anybody asks you what’s built to last, to outwear platina and the impious towers of loony kings, put a bug in their ear for me, will  you?—say: half-baked opinions, half-cocked prepossessions and godless proprieties founded on dread and incomprehension!”
     --From Marry Me, Carry Me

The first love in the world

There is an old Indian legend that says that in the beginning of the world men had four arms and four feet. They had such a high opinion of themselves they thought they were as good as the Great Spirit. This got the Great Spirit’s goat, naturally, so he took a knife and sliced them down the middle. Well, right away the two halves wanted to get together again, and their longing was the first love in the world. They dragged around till one day they met the Spirit of Fire and he asked what was the matter, for he saw they were down in the dumps. “We want you to sear us with flame,” they said, “melt us into one, for that is our only desire on earth.” So the Spirit of Fire took pity on them and did what they asked. And ever since, all the unconnected halves running around want to be seared with flame and melted together.

     --From Variation West

The novel writer

How a novel writer has got to be:
     insatiably curious about other people,
     how life is actually lived by other, unrelated, distinct persons
     inquisitive about customs, manners, morals
     must search, must possess, must note, must absorb, must master how things go on
     have the power to bring another social world into existence like it was really there
     devoted to "the sheer polyglossia" of the lexicon (ain't I though?)
     know how the different classes use language
     know something about the language of work & working
     know how language has changed and does change
     To a novelist that's also a poet, incoherence is an anguish of peculiar magnitude. "Make it cohere."

     --Notes from Ardyth Kennelly's commonplace book, from reading Helen Vendler's review of Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Prose in The New York Review of Books, Feb. 16, 1984.
     

"The rich fabric of her writing"

Miss Kennelly’s memory for details, both personal and factual, contributes to the rich fabric of her writing. She achieves an effect so realistic that the New York Times has said that her characters “all but march off the pages”; and so appealing that, as the Saturday Review of Literature has pointed out, “No one who reads (Ardyth Kennelly) can resist the temptation of reading aloud some of the passages that are sheer delight.”

     --From the back cover of Kennelly's novel Marry Me, Carry Me (1956)

Once upon a time at the Mountain Meadows...

At the top of the deep gully overgrown with willows and tules, they parked the car and walked the rest of the way. The land stretched out. Once upon a time there was no time and it was then that . . . autumn stood, blue haze along the horizon, the dusty smell of dry grass and wheat stubble in the air. And they came, fixed, perpetuated in unchanging form, sometimes at night, sometimes by broad daylight. It happens like that in the vicinity of churchyards, marshes, great buildings, solitary places, or places notorious because of some murder or where a very dreadful crime has been committed. Ambulones, they move about at midnight on great heaths and desert places.

            The trail boss, he comes first, heading the procession of carts, white-tops, horsemen . . . silent as clouds. God, they have banged along. Drive a man crazy, gritty wheels, the iron clank of traces, neck yokes, clumped hooves, clump clump clump, buckets, rattling pans, a crying child, laughter, moos and bleats, yells and barking
dogs and squeaking brakes, men taking the name of the Lord in vain, the long whip’s crack when deadhead oxen drop back and let their mates do all the pulling. This causes, God damn ’em, the doubletrees to scrape the wheel and the ox doing the pulling gets nervous . . . and then . . .

            But all is noiseless as the still moon now, as pinnacles of aged snow, they plod behind thick glass, walk like treading water through soft sand with feet like leaden weights, stumble on rocks, climb and run downhill, bodies with their measure and their space but instantaneous pictures on the air, shadowgraphed like life there, eerily . . .

     --From Variation West (quoting from Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy)

Righteousness

Righteousness is a fuel that, when it has some pitch in it of ambitious rivalry and the damper's left open to envy's draught, makes a hot enough fire to cook somebody's goose in quite a hurry.
     --From Marry Me, Carry Me

Women as paraphernalia

"A woman's supposed to be beautiful for a very good reason, because she's paraphernalia, she comes under the same category as September Morn or a Turkey carpet or a pair of deer's horns. You judge a man's looks by how well he's made to stand stress and strain and don't need to take anything off anybody and can walk right up to the old world and spit in its eye. The more fit he seems to be for life and to do all that's expected of a man the better looking he is. But a woman now, her looks depend on how fit she seems to be for a man, and how different she is, from him. The way she's built, there's supposed to be a lot of unnecessary furbelows here and there, impractical, while him, the more he's built like a tool to work with and the more there's nothing unnecessary, the better it is."
     "That's right," Alitta said, feeling rather disheartened, as at a sermon, drawing a deep sigh.
     "I could tell you a few things about fashion," the dressmaker went on. "What the men like best are what there's the least sense in, dresses you can't sit down in, that won't stand a lot of action, that hobble you and truss you up and slow you down and fix it so you can't hardly breathe, till finally you're off in one corner, like a bird in a cage, not cluttering up the busy paths in life that men has got to use. That's the styles they really like! They want to be the movers and shakers. They want to do the world's business and be the Brigadier General and whoa and giddup and carve the roast on Sunday. Women are just supposed to be, like an ornament on the mantel. . . ."
     "You think men don't like dyed hair and crimped hair and paint and powder an inch thick and beads and feather boas and I don't know what all," Rose said. "The majority of 'em say they don't--but listen--all that fixing and fussing and hanging things on suits 'em right down to a T. You know why? Because the more dolled up a woman is, the more of a dumb image she is, and there's nothing a man likes better than a dumb image except a still dumber one. Images don't fly in the face of nobody for one thing, and they don't rack their brains and start getting ideas, which can scare a person out of seven years' growth."
     --From Marry Me, Carry Me