On Obscurity and the Human Spirit

A  View of Auvers--Vincent Van Gogh

 "Indian Summer is like a woman. Ripe hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, and uncharted season which lives until winter moves  in with its backbone of ice and accouterments of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edge winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for the sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenwards to seek the first traces of a false softening."

With that stunning opening, Grace Metalious began her book about a New Hampshire town based on the small towns of Gilmanton, Laconia and Alton Bay. 
There are many opening lines of great books: "Mother died today, or perhaps yesterday." (Camus, L'Etranger,) but there is none better, more evocative, more beautifully honed, more perfect in setting up the themes of the story (age vs youth, warmth vs cold, longing vs denial, desire stirring dry roots) than Metalious's opening of a book, which has been under appreciated and embraced for all the wrong reasons, while its true strengths were ignored. 

And it came from an obscure place--New Hampshire.

When the Phantom published his first book, he was invited down to New York City for a party with lots of literary lights and celebrities and young women from the publishing houses kept saying, "Oh, you are so obscure to have made such a big splash!"   And the Phantom thought, "But I've never heard of you, why does that make me obscure and you so central and famous?"  For these women, New York was the center of the world and everywhere else was just, "elsewhere."  They knew all about everyone who was anyone in New York and not much about people from elsewhere--so who was provincial?

New York may be, as the Phantom's older son once said, "The coolest city in the world," but there are cool places elsewhere. 

An Island in Maine

 When Van Gogh went to Auvers, he made it cool by painting it, by his perception of that rural French town. 

When Willa Cather goes to Nebraska and sees something magnificent in the prairie or when Henry David Thoreau spends a week on the Merrimack River or on Walden Pond, those places become cool, famous, important, because of the minds which have formed them into a perception for all of us. 

This, the Phantom supposes, answers that question, "if a tree falls in the forest and there is no ear to hear it, is there sound?"  The answer is: There is only sound if there is a brain to make sense of it--otherwise it's just waves in the air and means nothing. We are not talking about physical attributes, but meaning. 

And there is meaning everywhere--in Central Park, in Brooklyn, along Fifth Avenue and on islands few people could find on a map.  If Gauguin paints those islands and their women, they are no longer obscure, if we find for  them a place in our minds. 

Grace Metalious's High School

Walking on the Plaice Cove beach this morning in the purple time before the sun peaked up above the waves, the Phantom and his dog were alone.  He knew they were not really alone, because just yards off shore there were living creatures--seals, fish, birds--mostly unseen but still very real and present, and he thought, this place is as important as any on the planet.