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Tag Archives: Memories

Mark Twain’s “The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day” – New memories from an old book

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by Wilson Wyatt Jr. in Inspiration, Writing

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Appalachians, Cumberland Plateau, Family, Fiction, Harry Caudill, Integrity Aspirations, J.D. Vance, Jeannette Walls, Kentucky, Mark Twain, Memories, Novel, Obed River, Political Corruption, Politics, Public Office, Samuel Clemens, Tennessee, The Gilded Age

1895 edition of The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day

AT YEAR’S END, I can’t help but feel some sense of introspection. This year, I opened an 1895 edition of The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. It was Twain’s novel about the turn of the century. The book was a gift to me from my father, who passed away in 1996.

When the book was published, the term “Gilded Age” became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. The plot opens as a poor Tennessee family, the Hawkins family, dreams of affluence by selling 75,000 acres of worthless Appalachian land acquired by their patriarch, Silas Hawkins. Truth, lies, and exaggeration color aspirations shaped by want, greed, and deceit. Mark Twain’s wonderfully sarcastic wit and his gift for description present an era of uncanny resemblance to the politics of today. The subtitle, containing the words “To-Day,” remains as current as human behavior’s lack of change.

In the 1950’s, my father bought some of the Cumberland mountain land once owned by Mark Twain, and I remember our family visits to that region. I remember the Obed River, where the “gold” glistening along the stream in the afternoon sun was actually iron-stained rock from abandoned coal mines.

Having recently read two wonderful memoirs, Hillbilly Elegy (by J.D. Vance) and The Glass Castle (by Jeannette Walls), along with a fine historic book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (by Harry Caudill), Twain’s description of the rugged East Tennessee hills comes alive with relevance.

More important to me, I can now see how reading The Gilded Age directly affected my father’s views of public service as well as providing for his family. I’ll be writing more about this. But, for now, I’ll enjoy turning the brittle pages, carefully, of this 1895 edition by Mark Twain…savoring his descriptions of the age…with relevance today.

First page, Chapter I, The Gilded Age, original illustrated edition – click on image to enlarge

 

 

A Choice…entertainment tonight, or poetry to inspire me for the rest of my life – Richard Blanco’s “One Today”

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by Wilson Wyatt Jr. in Aging and Freedom, Inspiration, Poetry, The Future, Uncategorized, Writing

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Choices, Cuba, Emigration, Feelings, Inaugural Poet, Inspiration, Memories, One Home, One Nation, One People, Poetry, Richard Blanco, The Writer's Center, United States, Writing

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I had that choice this week…one of those times to pick between the ordinary and the extraordinary.  I could have seen a good movie or a play or a show on TV.  Nothing wrong with that.  Today, entertainment is only a “click” away.

But, instead, we drove two hours to a special reading of a poem.  To hear Richard Blanco, the fifth Inaugural Poet in history, read from his personal poetry and “One Today,” the poem he wrote for the nation…at the 2013 Presidential Inauguration.  I knew this would be unique, rarely to be repeated in a small gathering, as the poet told his story.  Another emigrant making an indelible contribution to the United States.

My wife and I attended…no, we listened…at a special gathering orchestrated by The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda.  The poet, one of the Center’s former teachers, told his remarkable story.  These were the words behind the words…some of the raw history behind the music of his poetry.

Richard Blanco has been acclaimed in poetry circles, winning praise and awards, but now he is known as one of the few poets to be celebrated on the world stage.  This would be a distinctive experience, one of those times I could place delicately in my memory, offering inspiration on demand…a gift that keeps on giving.

From the ending of his poem, “One Today”

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight

of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always, always

Home, always under one sky, our sky. And always

One moon like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop

And every window, one country—all of us—

Facing the stars. Hope—a new constellation waiting

For us to map it, waiting for us to name it—together.

# # #

A special “thank you” to my friends at The Writer’s Center, “one home,” a writer’s home, for creating this personal opportunity.

Reflections create a private journey for the eye and mind

05 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Wilson Wyatt Jr. in Photography, Uncategorized, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

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Autumn, Chesapeake Bay, Memories, Mirror Lake, Reflections, Sunrise, Yosemite Valley

Leadenham Creek - A Still Afternoon

There is something magically captivating about reflections, as the sight of them draws the eye and stimulates the mind.  It’s a private moment, to ourselves, regardless of who is nearby.  We see the reflection’s image, and it draws thoughts within us…perhaps a memory…or perhaps just to preserve the moment’s beauty in time.

Mirror Lake - Yosemite Valley

Whether we are successful or not in our daily lives, rich or poor, young or old, beauty surrounds us in many ways.  It is our choice to carve out a slice of time to see it and appreciate it…and, if we do, the whole world takes on a different view. Reflections double the intensity.

Beginning of Autumn - Chesapeake Bay Country

November Sunrise - Chesapeake Bay Country

Memories come on little cat feet…remembering Carl Sandburg

29 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by Wilson Wyatt Jr. in Uncategorized, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

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Carl Sandburg, Chicago, Edward Steichen, Family, Fog, Kentucky, Louisville, Memories, Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man, Writing

September Fog - "It sits on silent haunches...and then moves on." (Click on image for full size)

Louisville, Kentucky 1954 – Carl Sandburg sat in the white Adirondack chair on our wrap-around front porch.  I was too young to know more about him than he was a famous writer, and he wrote “Fog,” which I could recite as a ten-year-old.  My older sisters were more aware of his work. We sat at his feet as he read to us.

His thinning white hair stood from his pale scalp like slender feathers, playing in the summer sun.  He wore a white shirt that hung loose from his skeletal frame.  When he smiled, his whole mouth opened and spread across his face, hinged from ear to ear.  He reminded me, as a boy, of the comedian, Joey Brown, who could fit a baseball inside his mouth.

He was a gentle man, but when he spoke, it was with a certain authority.  Words came from his mouth as long, slow syllables.  His rich, mellow voice trembled slightly, hanging onto certain words, accenting them with importance.  There was a musical cadence to his speech.  He punctuated sentences with silence, waiting for the words to take hold in space.  His open collar exposed a pronounced Adam’s apple, which moved up and down his stalk-like neck…syllable by syllable.

When he finished reading to us, he removed several pages of white note paper from a folder.  They contained handwritten words, scratched out in liquid black ink.  I couldn’t make them out.  There were lines and arrows and underlines, with other words scribbled along the sides.  He signed the pages and handed them to my oldest sister.  “I am dedicating this to you,” he said.

I later learned that those pen-scratched words composed the “Prologue” to the book The Family of Man.  It was a collection of an era of photography, inscribed “The greatest photographic exhibition of all time,” edited by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art.  The museum published it the following year, in 1955. My sister treasured those handwritten pages, and we all treasure the memory.

In the years since my childhood, when I see a fog bank covering the water and landscape, I often think of Carl Sandburg’s Fog, coming “on little cat feet…looking over harbor and city, on silent haunches.”  When I visit Chicago, I think of his Chicago, “Hog Butcher for the world…Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat…City of the Big Shoulders.”  I can hear his voice uttering the words, slowly, syllable by syllable.  And, when I read the Prologue to The Family of Man, I see him, sitting there, with a boy at his feet, as he speaks with a measured cadence:

“The first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Zamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, “I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the family.”   

It comes to me now, looking back. It all makes sense.

A writer’s voice and words have an inherent telepathy, replaying a memory, only with permanence.  The uttered words once scribbled down with liquid black ink on paper later become a gift, in the future, for all to read.  They live on, in time, from one place to another, one person to the next, indefinitely.

Preserving the Past as a Memory

31 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by Wilson Wyatt Jr. in Photography, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Chesapeake Bay, Fog, Memories, Oyster Boat, Oysters, Past, Tonging for Oysters, Watermen

So often, we want the best of our past carried into the future, when the only way to preserve it is through an image…and then be thankful for the memory.

Tonging for Oysters, Chesapeake Bay - Copyright 2008 by Wilson Wyatt Jr. (Click on image for full size)

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